The majority of operations are elective. Unscheduled emergencies take place in the trauma theatre for orthopaedics, the maternity theatre for obstetrics, or theatre 5 for most other specialties.
You will know which theatre you are allocated on a particular day from the clwrota app. You should contact the consultant or specialty anaesthetist you are with to find out where you should meet in the morning.
For elective lists, you should log into the AQUA programme in advance of the day to discover what operations are planned. For the trauma list, a “Golden Patient” (first patient) should be named by the trauma team on the preceding afternoon. There is also a trauma meeting of the surgeons at 08:15 in the ortho library. Make contact with the consultant regarding which patients on the list you should each assess. For big elective cases, a patient might come in the preceding afternoon for an injection for thromboprophylaxis, and they might meet the anaesthetist then before retiring to the “Kyle Court” accommodation on site.
Begin to assess or at least learn about the patients on your list using their electronic records. The one key document that is not always the electronic records in advance is the clerking from preassessment. If it remains on paper, you will want to see this document when you meet the patient. Shortly, all preassessment documentation will be available on software called “Synopsis”, and currently many patients’ Synopsis assessments are summarised and accessible on Care Portal or SciStore.
Your consultants are well accustomed to novice anaesthetists. In your first few weeks they will not want you to make any decisions about anaesthetic technique and they won’t expect you to consent for procedures you are not familiar with.
There will be a theatre brief in each individual theatre at 08:40. At the weekend, this will be performed in recovery. You should attend the brief for your theatre.
After you have finished the theatre list it is important to visit every patient on the list – called “Seeing your post-ops”. This lets you make any necessary adjustments to your post-operative prescriptions for analgesia or to treat nausea. Importantly it gives you the opportunity to assess how satisfactory the patient experience is so far and allows you to reflect on what you could have done to improve it. Inevitably, by the end of the day some of the patients who came for day case procedures have already been discharged before you have a chance to visit them.
Training in Anaesthesia Highlands of Scotland 