Circulators recovering

[nrsman1]

I was just wondering how common it was for circulators to recover their own patients whole on on?

[lockheart678]

I've worked in a place where the OR nurse would only have to help recover a patient if only one pacu nurse was present, and in the entire time I worked there, I never saw that happen. I've also worked at a place where the OR nurse has to recover the patient if called out. As an OR nurse, I disagree with this. I was trained for months to do my job in the OR, and that's what I'm good at. You can't really expect me to get a one week crash course in recovering patients and then expect that I'll be good at it, especially when my training most likely won't let me see a situation where something goes wrong, so I'm screwed when it happens to me as I'm the only nurse there. Nobody at my facility would ever expect a pacu nurse to just come in and blindly run an OR, so it's not fair to us to have to do it in pacu.

[ShannonRN2010, BSN, RN]

I have worked as both a circulator and a PACU nurse...both have their own challenges. I prefer to circulate...but I have been pulled to recovery and pre-op as well to work