Evening shift in the OR?

[annacs]

Hi everyone - I am a junior nursing student who was just accepted into a competitive, limited-seat perioperative clinical course for the month of January. I was assigned to work with a preceptor for the evening shift in the main OR of the hospital. I'm wondering what to expect during the evening shift as I have only ever experienced a day shift with a CRNA.

Thanks in advance!

[subee, MSN, CRNA]

More urgent and emergent cases.

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

It's really going to depend on the type of facility. My hospital has surgeon block time until 5:30pm, and routinely will grant permission to schedule cases that run later than that. It's not uncommon to be running scheduled elective cases until 7pm. We are also a level 2 trauma center, so we do see a fair amount of traumas (primarily orthopedic injuries, although we had a heck of a stabbing case night before last) and of course, the urgent cases that can't wait- appendectomies, fracture management, maybe an organ procurement. You may want to ask your instructor what to expect as they would probably have a better idea of the particulars.

[Rory8]

I worked the evening shift in the OR for a while when I was done with orientation and I loved it. At my hospital, evening shift is 3-11pm so when we got in we would finish the cases that were going and sometimes we would start cases after those were done. Most days were busy and we'd be done with cases around 9pm and then we'd be responsible for stocking rooms and putting unused supplies away. Some cases would go past even 11 and night shift would take over. We would also get traumas pretty frequently. This will depend on where you work, but I work at a Level 1 Trauma Center so we had to be prepared for anything to come up. The traumas were my favorite part, you'll see some pretty crazy things that day shift won't.