Perioperative nurses: the constant struggle

Friends of African Nursing provides focused education in perioperative care to nurses struggling to provide quality care in similar situations.

I had just changed into blues, and was making my way through to the theatre manager’s office. The changing room was very small and crowded with ancient lockers, most of which did not shut properly, let alone lock. I clambered over a bench which marked the ‘red line’ and was strewn on either side by abandoned clogs and boots, most of which had seen better days and needed a good wash. I was greeted by Lydia, the theatre manager, who explained immediately that she was not a theatre nurse and had only been in post for two months. She had been allocated to the post by the Ministry of Health although her skills were in ward nursing. She said her heart was still in the ward. I gave her a gift of a perioperative text book, some eye protection and a few boxes of sutures, which had accompanied me from home. She locked the office door from a chatelaine at her waist, and we took a brief tour of the suite of six theatres. The hospital building from the outside was a typical colonial style hospital which had been built with long open corridors around gardens, with extending Nightingale type wards of 30 beds each, with windows on either side of the ward allowing cooling breezes to flow across the patients. The theatres were equally old with green tiles on the walls and a familiar lay out. They were distinctly beaten up from years of use with little evidence of any recent maintenance. Wooden doors between theatres and the anaesthetic rooms were splintered, floors had bits of lino missing and the anterooms were full of broken equipment such as old operating tables and tale positioning pieces. The stock room held pitifully few stores and the instrument tray shelves were almost empty. Two of the six theatres were in use, so we did not go in. Peeking through the theatre doors, I saw familiar sights of the team hard at work, heads bowed in concentration over the wound and the anaesthetist peering over the top of the linen drapes. There were no patients in recovery and the two staff sitting at the desk were waiting for work.

Staffing levels