Pre-Operative Visits by the OR Nurse?

Abstract

The challenge of opening the double-doored barrier of fear is charged to us. We must accept this cry for help, not only for our pa, tients’ sake, but for our own as well. We are an integral part of scientific advancement in the field of surgical intervention-open heart surgery, organ transplants, neurosurgery. There is no limit to the possibilities ahead of us. However, if we become so entangled with the advancements as to neglect our patients, we will become more and more depersonalized and in the end, will hurt ourselves most of all. For many years, the double door of any surgical suite has spelled out fear to many. What happens behind those doors? Who cares in there? Now, because of changes in educational curriculum and many a new graduate’s lack of accurate knowledge about the operating room, we have increasing responsibilities. Before us lies the most enriching experience we can find in nursing. We can and must, provide a portion of patient teaching that would otherwise be lacking or completely forgotten. How many floor nurses really know what happens to a patient when he leaves his bed to go to the operating room? The responsibility for the patient’s welfare is now given to the operating room nurse; yet no report is made to her. The patient may be gone from the floor four hours, two hours, or twenty minutes. In that time,. the OR nurse is accepting a great responsibility in the form of human life. She is accepting that responsibility blindly if she knows nothing about the person entrusted to her care. For many years, we have been accused of being glorified technicians and often I have wondered if this title has, perhaps, been partially earned. Have we ignored our responsibilitien as operating room nurses by not providing continuity of patient care? Have we accepted a pre-operative check list, moved the cart in an operating room, and forgotten that there lies a frightened patient whose fear has been intensified by our aloofness and obvious lack of concern? We can say, “NO!” out loud, but can we say, “No!” to ourselves. There is much we can do to eliminate this depersonalization of both patient and nurse, and one of the ways of accomplishing this lies in the realm of pre-operative visits. For two years, I have been a part of a program of preoperative visits by the operating room nurse. Although this was not an established practice and was not done by all employees in a truly beneficial manner, it has convinced me of the great potential of such a practice. I made these visits because of what they did for me, both as a person and as a nurse as well as what they did for the patient. In the past months, I have been recording questions I am asked and answers I have given. One of the most frequent questions patients ask is: “Will I be asleep when I leave my room?” or, “But, I’m not asleep yet!” made by patients who arrive in the operating room without having had a single pre-operative nurse visit. This small evidence of anxiety can, of course, be very simply alleviated by a pre-operative visit. One day, I visited a man who had recently arrived from Denmark and who was to have a pyelolithotomy the next morning. We spoke together for nearly a half-hour, before the patient finally realized that I was from the operating room. He exclaimed, “You mean they let you come out from there, but now you are not sterile!” He completely avoided talking about his surgery and so did I until he said, “Have you seen my kind of operation