Surgical Nurse Practitioner Hours?

[burrelll12]

How many hours a week do surgical nurse practitioners work on average? I am currently starting my last semester of nursing school and I am interested in becoming a NP with the RNFA certification. I'm really interested in surgery but I just wonder about how many hours they work per week.

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

Going to depend on a lot of things:

I work with more PAs than NPs, but inside the OR they pretty much fulfill the same role of first assistant. Here, they work until the cases are finished. Sometimes that means they're done (in the OR) by lunch; other days it means they're working until 9pm or even later. Then there's rounding on the floors with the surgeons to consider- in my facility, they do both OR and rounds. Some of the surgical groups that employ enough NPs/PAs will have one free during the day to do rounds, thus meaning when the others are done in the OR, they're done. Other groups employ fewer NPs/PAs than surgeons, so they can be pretty busy bouncing between rooms depending on the case and which surgeon won the fight to have the first assistant, then they have to round on patients on the floors or do discharge orders for those going home the same day.

Then there's surgical volume to take into consideration. My OR tends to see a little bit of a slowdown in the summer (people on vacation putting off elective surgeries) and around the major holidays (especially Thanksgiving/Christmas). Not as many patients = less time spent in the hospital.

So really, there is no one real answer. It depends on the facility's staffing if employed by the facility (first assistants working shifts which personally I've never seen) or on the surgeons' preferences if employed by an independent surgeon group. It depends on the surgical volume.

Of the PAs that work in my specialty (cardiac), they are salaried. They get paid the same whether they work 20 hours a week or 60 hours per week. And with our case volume, they typically work more 60 hour weeks than they do 20 or even 40 hour weeks. Plus, they cover call for emergency surgeries and don't get additional pay for it like those of us who are OR hourly employees do.

[Alicia777, MSN, NP]

I work a regular 40 hour week. We all round on our inpatients and then some of us break off to the OR for cases..

I don't take call and if I chose to moonlight it's very lucrative.