refusing to prep a pt for surgery?

Are you a member of a Nurse's union? If so seek their help! Where I come from it is permisable to distanced yourself from a situation that threaten's your registration. We as Nurse's are the patient's advocate and must fight for their safety!

Op, it's already the 29th where I live, so any further discussion is probably moot at this point. You don't say what kind of surgery is planned. As the pre-op nurse, you don't have much say as to whether the surgery is performed or not, other than fulfilling your pre-operative duty and ensuring the patient signs informed consent.

You can inform the theater UM that you will be doing this, so as to ensure that the PATIENT is on board with the "plan", and that the Dr, Hospital Manager and NSM have all done their duty and informed the patient of the potential safety hazards,!20which are ultimately their responsibility. If the hospital is indeed performing a procedure on a patient for which it is not equipped, both doctor and patient need to sign documents indemnifying the hospital if things go South.

I just wanted to follow up and thank you for all of your responses. Unfortunately the surgery went as scheduled, and instead of being able to distance myself from the situation I was in fact the primary nurse for both before and after surgery (until I handed off to the ICU nurse) because I was the only one in the recovery area competent/capable/comfortable with the invasive monitoring that the pt came out of the OR with. The next day I told the manager that I would no longer be working in that unit because of the safety problems that I had identified and then witnessed and experienced (including being left completely alone with the pt in the PACU). No more PACU for me. Thank you all for the advice though-it was very appreciated! :)

Being left ALONE in PACU unfortunately is very common.... We have the surgery nurse to call if we need help (yeah right).. If though I do think ASPAN standards do state 2 licensed nurses in unit at all times, again HA.... If they bring me a patient and I'm not comfortable with their status, neither that circulator nor the anesthesia provider get to leave... I ususally prefer the CRNA to stay over circulator, most of the time they aren't comfortable either... When we are on call, its just one of us.. The ciruculator always tries to leave and go home when they are done, and so does anesthesia... But sorry I'm not being left in a locked down unit alone