In the early 1980’s nursing students at St.Albans City Hospital undertook their second year of training at the QEII hospital in Welwyn Garden City (where I had done my stint as a healthcare assistant on paediatrics). My first placement there was in the operating theatre suite, another area like ITU, which I was quite anxious about. It was a complete change from the ward environment and it didn’t feel like anything we had learned to do in a ward would help us in theatre. There was no washing or feeding, no back rounds and minimal chatting with the patients. The thing I remember most was that there was nowhere obvious for students to fit in because every job seemed to be much too important for us to be left with.
By the end of the placement we were just about trusted to clean instruments and put them through the autoclave and wash the theatre walls and floors. I say trusted but on one occasion I was asked to run the final set of instruments through the autoclave steriliser at the end of a busy day and managed to make a complete hash of it. The door was difficult to close and I was asked to put some oil onto the hinge. I felt like I was always asking questions and never really knowing what I was doing so when I couldn’t find the oil I didn’t want to go back to the senior nurse and say so. Fortunately there was some oil of cloves in the cupboard which I thought would do fine (oil was oil I thought). So I dropped some oil on the door hinge inside the autoclave and set it to run. After 10 minutes or so the autoclave got really hot and as it did so the smell of cloves (a big pungent, penetrating smell) filled the theatre. I looked on in horror as the smell got more intense but there was nothing I could do about it. I ended up running the machine several times over to try and remove the smell but it seemed to get worse. Having closed the theatre down for the evening I then worried myself sick all night that someone would tell me off when they walked into the highly spiced theatre the next day. Nobody said a word though so presumably the next day’s operating team either liked it or couldn’t smell a thing through their masks!
The theatre suite was run by a senior nurse who had a keen eye for detail and knew exactly what was going on in every corner of the department. She would allocate the students each day by bestowing on them the temporary title of Anaesthetic Queen, Pre-op Queen, Queen Runner or Recovery Queen (we were all girls). Setting out the instrument trays for each days list was a particular challenge for me as I could never remember which order everything went in for the surgeon and of course some surgeons liked their instruments in a different order to others even if it was the same operation. I did assist in recovery on a few occasions and one of the other students had the opportunity to assist in a tonsillectomy (although it was complete disaster as she handed out all the instruments in the wrong order and the senior registrar was so annoyed he said he would not have student nurses in with him again).
Everyone in the department wore theatre blues including the students so it was difficult to know who was who. Despite this there was a very clear hierarchy which meant you could get it badly wrong if you didn’t know who was an incredibly important consultant (as in who thought they were an incredibly important surgeon) and who was just another student nurse.
Some of the surgeons had us quaking in our clogs but despite that watching them operate was fabulous. Although I found it hard to feel at home in theatres I did find the whole business of poking around inside the body amazing. Back then we didn’t have the technology that theatres do now, so most surgery was performed direct, there was little key hole (if any) and I don’t recall any camera guided surgery. The orthopaedic surgery in particular was (and still is) quite basic in the sense it was all saws, retractors and brute force.
All in all, I was enjoyed my experience but was relieved to leave and get back the world of talking patients and knowing exactly my place as a 2nd year student with a long way to go yet.
