Every week I look at the live scrub scout and anaesthetic nurse vacancies coming across my desk, and this week is worth talking about. Right now there are genuinely live, currently advertised scrub scout and anaesthetic nurse vacancies open across Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia and South Australia, all at the same time. That spread tells you something about where perioperative nursing sits in the market today, and it is worth unpacking what it actual

The PACU and recovery nurse role is one of the most consistently advertised positions in perioperative nursing across Australia and New Zealand, yet it is often reduced to a single line on a position description: post-anaesthesia care. In practice the role carries its own skill set, its own pace and a genuine case for a career specialty in its own right, rather than a stop on the way to theatre. This bulletin sets out what the role actually involves, how it differs from ward-

Kate on why the nerves of starting a new perioperative role never fully disappear, and what actually helps in the first few months.

She qualified in June 1908 and was handed the operating theatre at Napier Hospital within months. She left it for a tent on a paddock, because that was where her people were dying of typhoid.

The verified story of Sister Alicia Mary Kelly, an Australian Army nurse awarded the Military Medal in 1917 for staying with her patients during sustained shelling at a Casualty Clearing Station.

Two of the clearest promotion pathways in perioperative nursing right now are the Associate Nurse Unit Manager (ANUM) role and the Clinical Nurse Manager role in theatres. Both sit above the scrub scout nurse and anaesthetic nurse levels, and both are currently open across Australian private hospitals, but the two roles are not the same job with a different title. Understanding what each one actually involves is the first step if you are considering the move from clinical the

Mary Adelaide Nutting built the structured, graded nurse training that every hospital specialty, including perioperative nursing, grew out of, and became the world's first professor of nursing in 1907.

Most theatre nurses do not resign from a theatre job over one bad day. By the time the resignation letter gets written, the decision has usually been building for months. The reason given at an exit interview is not always the reason underneath it. Before you resign from a theatre job, there is one question worth asking yourself honestly, because the answer changes what you should do next. The question I ask first When a theatre nurse tells me they are ready to resign, I ask

Ann Stokes entered the United States Navy record during the Civil War as a Black woman who had escaped slavery. She served as a nurse aboard USS Red Rover, the Union Navy hospital ship on the Mississippi, decades before the Navy Nurse Corps formally existed.

Hester Maclean helped turn nursing in New Zealand from a collection of local practices into a profession with national standards, a professional journal, military nursing leadership and a stronger public voice.

Before Australia was a federation, Ellen Julia “Nellie” Gould was already helping build an organised military nursing service. She selected nurses for South Africa, led them through the Boer War and later returned to service during the First World War.

A counter offer arrives at the worst possible moment. You have already made the decision, already had the difficult conversation, and then your manager asks for a day to see what they can do. This is one of the most common things theatre nurses ring me about, and it is worth thinking through calmly rather than in the corridor between cases. I am not going to tell you never to accept one. Sometimes a counter offer is the right answer. But it deserves the same scrutiny you woul

The anaesthetic nurse role is one of the clearest specialist routes in perioperative nursing, and one of the least well explained. Most theatre nurses first meet it from the other side of the drape, as the person who has already settled the patient by the time the scrub team is gowned. This bulletin sets out what the anaesthetic nurse role actually involves, what hospitals across Australia and New Zealand ask for, and how scrub scout nurses move across. What the role covers A

Scrub scout nursing is often written about as one job. In practice the specialty you work in shapes your day more than almost anything else on the position description. The same title can mean forty short cases in an ophthalmology list or two long ones in general surgery, and the skills that make you good at one are not automatically the skills that make you good at the other. This bulletin looks at what different scrub scout nurse lists actually ask of you, and how to use th

Alice Ross-King was a theatre sister before she was anything else. By 1914 she was in charge of a private hospital in Melbourne, having trained at the Alfred Hospital and worked as a ward sister, night superintendent and acting matron. Four years later she was one of the first Australian nurses to be awarded the Military Medal, for what she did in a canvas ward that had just been bombed. Every fact below is drawn from her service record, her diaries and the official record. B

Choosing your referees is usually the last thing a theatre nurse thinks about and one of the first things an employer acts on. Most people give it about ninety seconds, name whoever they reported to most recently, and move on. Then a reference comes back flat, or late, or from someone who genuinely could not remember which lists they scrubbed on, and a strong application quietly loses its momentum. It is worth more than ninety seconds. Here is how I would go about it. A refer

A state-by-state look at the genuinely live perioperative vacancies across Australia and New Zealand, from anaesthetic nursing to cardiac electrophysiology, cath lab and scrub and scout roles.

A closer look at the perioperative nurse educator role in private hospital theatres, what it actually involves day to day, and who it tends to suit.

Why measuring your theatre career against a colleague's timeline rarely gives you an honest picture, and what to pay attention to instead.

Loyalty to a hospital is a good instinct when it is returned. Here is how to tell when it has become the only reason you are still there.