Your pay may be fixed. Your conditions are not - Theatre Nurse working conditions

If you are a theatre nurse in a private hospital, your pay is largely decided for you. Your classification and your years of service set the rate, the agreement is a public document, and there is not much room to move.

So when nurses tell us they are thinking about a change, it is almost never about money.

It is about the parts of the job nobody puts in the ad.

The things that actually vary between theatres

Two hospitals can look identical on paper and be completely different places to work. These are the differences that matter, and they are bigger than most nurses expect.

On-call and recall. How often you are on the roster, and more importantly how often you are actually called in. One in four with regular call-ins is a different life from one in eight where the phone rarely rings.

Roster notice. Some units publish six weeks ahead. Others tell you next week. If you have children, study, or a partner who also does shift work, this single factor decides whether the job is liveable.

Scrub and scout rotation. Some theatres genuinely rotate. Others park you in one specialty because you are good at it and it suits the roster. That is comfortable for a year and career limiting after three.

Case mix and list volume. Whether you are seeing complex work or the same procedure on repeat. Whether the lists run at a pace you can learn from, or one that leaves no room to think.

What happens when someone calls in sick. Whether the list gets adjusted, or whether the team simply absorbs it and the day gets harder.

Study support. Whether post-graduate perioperative study is funded and rostered around, or whether you are expected to do it on your own time and your own money.

The lead. Your NUM sets the culture of the theatre more than anything else. This is the single most common reason nurses tell us they want to leave, and the single hardest thing to assess from the outside.

Why you cannot find any of this out

Here is the problem. You only ever see inside your own theatre.

You know how your unit runs, and you assume it is roughly normal, because you have nothing to compare it against. Nurses regularly tell us their on-call load is standard when it is well above what we see elsewhere. Others assume everywhere runs the same rotation they do, and have no idea what they are missing.

Job ads will not help you. They describe the role, not the conditions. Nobody advertises their recall rate.

And interviews are usually too polite to get there. You are being assessed, so you ask about the specialty and the team, and you leave without knowing the things that will actually determine whether you last two years or six months.

The questions worth asking

If you are interviewing anywhere, ask these. The answers, and the hesitation before them, tell you more than the rest of the conversation.

• How often is on-call rostered, and realistically how often does the phone go?

• How far ahead is the roster published?

• Do nurses rotate between scrub and scout, and between specialties? How is that decided?

• What happens to the list when someone calls in sick?

• Who has done post-graduate study here recently, and what support did they get?

• How long have most of the team been here?

That last one is the one people forget. A theatre where everyone has been there for years is telling you something. So is one where nobody has.

Then compare honestly - Theatre Nurse working conditions

Once you have the answers, compare them against your own unit properly. Not against the version of your job you have on a bad Friday, and not against the version you describe when someone asks how work is going.

Most nurses who move are not running from a bad job. They are moving because one specific thing has stopped working, and they have found somewhere it works better.

The trick is knowing which thing it is, and knowing what normal actually looks like.

Not sure whether your conditions are normal?

We place theatre nurses into permanent roles across Australia and New Zealand, which means we spend our days inside a lot of different theatres. We have a fairly good idea of what usual looks like.

If you want a second opinion, email me and tell me three things.

1. Your role

2. Where you are based

3. What would have to be different for you to seriously consider a move

We will tell you honestly how your situation compares, and if there is something out there that fixes it, we will tell you that too.

If there is not, we will say so. There is no cost to you, and no obligation.

Kate Wheeler, Recruitment Partner kate@carejobz.com

Carejobz. Specialist perioperative recruitment. Permanent by design.