Maureen Ta, RN, BLS
Circulating Nurse

Background

I received my BSN from SUNY Brockport, Brockport, NY, and got a job at Strong Memorial Hospital. I worked there for six years. I earned my Forensic Nursing Certification while at Highland and will take the CNOR (Certified Nurse Operative Room) exam soon.

Time at Highland Hospital

I've been at Highland Hospital since 2006. I grew up in a small town and it feels the same at Highland. There's a family atmosphere and people from all over this hospital say "hi" to you when they see you in the halls and cafeteria.

Career Path at Highland Hospital

I started in the OR. I've completed the process to become a Level III nurse, including a special project on malignant hyperthermia. 

My Dominant Personality Traits

I'm a people person through and through. I enjoy and get along with people from all walks of life and with wildly diverse personalities. My teammates say I'm fun to be around but also hard working and knowledgeable. I also have that critical attribute that all OR nurses have to have—stamina! You can be on your feet in an operating room for hours at a time.  

About the Operating Room

If you've never worked in the OR there's a ton of information to absorb—names, sizes, locations, and different varieties of hundreds of sutures, dressings, instruments, instrument sets; different setups and patient positioning for each procedure; different surgeons' preferences. You have to have good critical thinking and organizational skills. Time management issues are different than on a floor. In the OR, it's more about when to do your charting, when to do your counts, placing orders for lab tests, etc. It can get crazy, but for me it's a manageable sort of crazy. We have a good training program and we're very organized, so we have a good place for a newbie to build confidence.

During orientation you learn all the services, then people stay mainly in one service, but you still need to know the other services for when you're on call. We do both ambulatory and inpatient surgeries. 

Even if you're an experienced OR nurse, it can still be challenging depending on what room you're in. It can be hectic but the staff makes it very positive and even fun. We're a close knit group and there's a lot of camaraderie. 
 
I chose to work in the OR for the regular hours, but now I love my job and can't imagine being anywhere else. I don't interact with patients like I would on a floor, but I really enjoy interacting with my co-workers, ensuring patient safety, talking with patients and families and reassuring them, and having one patient to focus on at a time. 

We take weekend and holiday call, but it's not a lot, especially when you look at all the weekends and holidays nurses work on the floor. In a three-month period, we take a total of 24 hours of weekend call. We might also have some short call during the week, usually about 2 hours. On holidays we have one winter and one summer holiday where we have to take eight hours of call, every other year.
     
My duties include setting up the rooms, checking consents, troubleshooting equipment and other problems as they develop, watching for any breaks in technique, supervising the scrub nurse or tech, who passes instruments to the surgeon and completing nursing documentation. I float to different services. Every team is different but they're all accepting if you're competent and hard working. The teams work very well together. There's lots of unspoken communication. 

Patient safety is our first and foremost priority and I'm very proud of the work we do to optimize it. I'm also proud of our technical capabilities. We recently purchased a DaVinci robot for several different types of surgeries. While we help people at a high technical level, the humanistic focus of nursing is still there. The nurses are the last person a patient sees before going to sleep and the first when he or she wakes.