20 YEARS IN OP E RAT ING THEAT R E S
interest from nursing students to come into the operating theatre for a career; it is just as well that we have our operating department practitioner colleagues. Pay is also an issue and Mona believes that we will not get good candidates coming into healthcare or those staying to take up leadership roles unless we pay them better. Many leaving NHS at present are working in supermarkets and getting a better wage. One particular bugbear, which Mona says could improve a great deal, is the level of documentation. She reports that when she is examining notes, following a patient safety incident, the documentation is often poor and incomplete. There is a tick box mentality, which does not work with accountability at all, as it gives insufficient information. However, she also recognises that an enormous amount of data is required. The culture needs to change to reflect that staff understand what accountability truly means. She also commented that staff need to be looked after and supported to do their jobs well. Mona concluded by saying that we are here to serve and to be responsible for our own health and well-being but that employers also had a shared responsibility.
Conclusion Twenty years is a long time and a large section of the more than seventy years
Perioperative care has always been an incredibly challenging environment but there has been a great improvement over the 20 years by use of the Standards document produced by AfPP. There is also guidance for risk management audits and calculations for staffing numbers for safe care.
that the NHS has been in existence. Photographs from that time show how much is very different. There have been many new ideas which have been forced upon ‘the way we do things round here’, a lot of them completely barmy. Tax payers have had to pay for actions to create new structures for healthcare both acute and primary care. New roles have been announced by politicians without any consultation with the professions or practice. Sometimes it feels that we work in a political football that is kicked back and forth without any apparent benefit to patients.
However, for all that, patients have more say in the care they are to receive now and are part of the decision making in primary
care (less so in acute care) and their journey and overall experience has moved forward year by year. Professionally, as mentioned by the
interviewees, nursing and perioperative care has developed into a more equal team where our voices are heard and understood. We still have work to do to ensure that every day we deliver safe care in the way that we want to and that patients come to no harm. There is no doubt that things have got better and long may that continue.
References 1 Institute of Medicine 2000 To Err is Human- building a safer healthcare system. https://nap.
nationalacademies.org/catalog/9728/to-err-is- human-building-a-safer-health-system
CSJ
Decontamination of Ultrasound Probes MANCHESTER STUDY DAY
26th
January 2023 Clayton Hotel Manchester City Centre 09:00am-4:00pm 55 Portland Street, Manchester, M1 3HP
Topics Include Probing questions - Introducing the IP Toolkit
Journey to High Level Decontamination for Transvaginal probes Traceability - Our Last Line of Defence Hands-On Workshops
Register today at
www.nanosonics.co.uk NOVEMBER 2022
WWW.CLINICALSERVICESJOURNAL.COM l 25
4 CPD credits
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