Perioperative practice
60 years of championing safe care in theatres
The Association for Perioperative Practice is committed to helping perioperative practitioners to develop their skills, as well as improving patient care and safety. As we approach the end of 2024, it is a time for reflection, and this year has been a particularly important year for the AfPP – as it has celebrated its 60th Anniversary.
Daisy Ayris first set up the National Association of Theatres Nurses (NATN) in 1964, changing its name to the Association for Perioperative Practice (AfPP) in 2005 – in recognition of the significant changes that were happening in the perioperative environment, and to accommodate the growing number of Operating Department Practitioners (ODPs) wanting to join the membership. At this year’s 60th Anniversary Conference,
AfPP President, Ruth Collins, celebrated the organisation’s legacy and paid tribute to the organisation’s forward-thinking founder, who had the idea of bringing together other like-minded clinicians to improve patient safety within the perioperative environment. As AfPP celebrated its “diamond anniversary”, Ruth praised Daisy’s confidence, courage and determination to step up and take the lead in developing a place of excellence – she thanked her for leaving behind her a “precious jewel”, in the form of AfPP. Ruth also likened perioperative practitioners
to “diamonds”: “Formed under pressure, each with their own unique qualities, these diamonds may have flaws, but they are all beautiful,” she commented. Taking place at the University of Warwick, it
truly was a ‘diamond’ of an event, at which over 500 perioperative practitioners came together to celebrate at the anniversary conference, as well as to learn from top experts on a variety of topical areas – including: clinical human factors, infection prevention in theatres, surgical site surveillance, sustainability, risk management in the perioperative environment, and much more. The Association has tirelessly campaigned
to tackle bullying in theatres in recent years and has raised awareness of the importance of kindness. This focus was evident in the anniversary conference programme, with thought-provoking sessions on the impacts of incivility and how this can create an unsafe environment in surgical teams.
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www.clinicalservicesjournal.com I December 2024
Founder of the campaign Civility Saves Lives, Dr. Chris Turner, gave a powerful account of how incivility can impact not just those who are on the receiving end of this behaviour, but also those who witness it. Dr. Turner is a consultant in emergency medicine, working in a tertiary trauma centre in the West Midlands. He has spoken at numerous events about the power of civility and his TEDx talk ‘When rudeness in teams turns deadly’ has received over 167K views.1 Dr. Turner pointed out that although it can sometimes feel like culture never changes, we have already come a long way – therefore he was optimistic that we can change the dominant culture and deliver positive change. He highlighted the importance of effective
team working: “The older I get, the more I realise I get results with other people. There’s almost nothing that I can do by myself,” he commented. “It doesn’t matter how good I am at my task, if I create an environment where other people are not able to flourish and do their tasks,” he continued.
He went on to discuss unconscious bias in diverse surgical teams. For effective teamworking, Dr. Turner pointed out that it is not enough to “swing your lens around” and imagine the other person’s perspective. “The problem is that you still have all of your
unconscious biases in play. This means you end up imagining how the other person would see something and what they would think about it. The evidence is that we are not very good at this. If we really want to know how other people see a problem and the solutions that they see to it, we need to do two things – the first is to ask them, and the second is to listen to their answer. This sounds obvious, but it takes time, and we struggle with this because we’re running from pillar to post. But there is no shortcut; if we want to know how other people see something, we need to get them talking and information is key. “When we share information with each other,
we make better decisions. There’s a lot of evidence for this – we want to be in a situation where people are contributing…If we have
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