Any USAF Surgical Nurses Out There?

[Periop-Doug]

​are there any ad/reserve usaf surgical nurses out there who can give me a few details regarding the daily work life of an operating room nurse? i.e. hours worked per week, typical on-call schedules, deployments, work atmosphere/professionalism of or staff and doctors, etc.

i am an rn (adn) with 10+ yrs of surgery & endoscopy experience, now graduated with bsn, and prior service (11 yrs usaf enlisted), who is considering active duty and/or reserves usaf.

any insight is greatly appreciated!

doug

[CRF250Xpert]

I did it. It's a cake job. Awesome hours, 0600 to 1530. It's not very cerebral though - anyone can be trained to look for stuff - I never could figure out what about the OR ever required any licensed personnel. Deployments are constant depending on Ops tempo. The demand should be getting much better; at the height of war we rotated constantly in and out of Balad and you'd work 24 hours to 36 hour shift with constant mass casualties. Now, certainly not as hard due to much less killing. Staff is typical USAF -most good folks some not so much. Call depends on where you are. I was in a trauma center so call was always getting called back in for some nonsense. If you are at a small place with no services, you'd likley never have to do anything at 0200. The USAF only has about 240 OR RNs so you can only get stationed in a few places and you'll always work for and with the same folks - that's good or bad depending on what you like.

In my opinion, the OR is a great place to hang out, get paid well, and work very little and stare at a clock. I personally couldn't stand it. I'm kind of type A, like to work, like to use my brain - the USAF OR life is look for stuff, take a break, look for some more stuff, go to lunch, look for stuff, go home. It's awesome if you never aspire to do anything and want cake hours.

Good luck.