An award for Vanessa
Recognition for Vanessa, of the theatre staff at Cairns Base Hospital, who was the first person there to assemble the Neo Reamer independently. An award was put together for her that morning.
Instrument assembly is one of those things that sounds trivial and is not. Theatre staff who know an unfamiliar instrument set properly save real time on an operating list and reduce the chance of something going wrong.
Instrument sets in shoulder surgery
Shoulder operations use instrument sets that are specific to the implant system being used, and those sets are often large. A replacement set may contain trial components in several sizes, guides, reamers and the instruments for inserting each part, and they have to be presented in the order the operation requires. Individual results vary.
Assembling an instrument correctly is not a matter of following a diagram once. The scrub team has to know which parts belong together, in what order, and what the instrument is about to be used for, so that it is ready at the point the surgeon needs it rather than several minutes later. On a long list those minutes accumulate.
Why it matters more at a regional hospital
Cairns Base Hospital is the main referral hospital for far north Queensland. Where specialist surgery is provided through visiting operating lists, the local theatre team may see a particular instrument set intermittently rather than every week, which makes learning it properly harder and more valuable at the same time.
Staff who know an unfamiliar set thoroughly are part of what makes those lists possible, and the capability stays with the hospital after the visiting surgeon has gone. That is how a regional service builds up over years rather than depending on any one person.
The theatre team
An operation is usually described in terms of the surgeon, which understates how many people it depends on. A shoulder list involves anaesthetists, scrub and scout nursing staff, technicians and recovery staff, and the list runs at the pace of whichever part of that chain is least prepared. Theatre nursing and technical staff are rarely named in any account of an operation, and the contribution is easy to overlook precisely because it is only noticed when it is missing.
Related information
See our other Cairns posts, including operating at Cairns Base Hospital, and our shoulder surgery and surgery FAQs pages.