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STAFFING
Stacy Gober, RN, BSN
In Search of the Perfect OR Nurse
Wouldn't part Florence Nightingale, part MacGyver be great?
I
f I could engineer the ideal surgical nurse, she'd have a degree in
nursing, a minor in common sense and a concentration in basic
construction. She'd master the art of painless IV starts, assess
patients accurately and efficiently, and have the know-how to change
light bulbs in surgical microscopes when they burn out in the middle
of a case. Does my dream hire exist, or is she a figment of my overactive imagination?
High-tech headaches
Today's operating room is a complex environment full of HD video
components, wireless
routers, laparoscopic
MANY HATS
Surgical nurses
must tend to
patients and malfunctioning equipment with equal
expertise.
instruments and robots
with multi-million dollar price tags that assist
in microsurgery. (Not to
mention the older
machines that only a
handful of nurses actually
know how to use and troubleshoot.) It seems technological advancements are out2 6
O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | D E C E M B E R 2012