Operating room and perioperative staffing

Roles we place

Circulating nurses and RN first assistants, scrub nurses, certified surgical technologists, sterile processing technicians, PACU and pre-op nurses, and perioperative charge and coordinator roles.

Settings include hospital main theatres, ambulatory surgery centres, specialty surgical hospitals, endoscopy suites, cath labs and interventional radiology.

Why service line is the first question

Perioperative is the specialty where a generic requisition does the most damage. The skill is procedure specific, and a circulator who is excellent in general surgery may be genuinely unsafe in a cardiac room, not through any deficiency but because they have never done it.

We screen against the service lines the person has actually worked:

• General and colorectal, including laparoscopic and robotic
• Orthopaedics, total joints, trauma and spine, which is equipment heavy and vendor dependent
• Cardiac and vascular, including open heart, which is its own discipline
• Neurosurgery, cranial and spinal
• Obstetric, caesarean sections and emergency response
• ENT, ophthalmology, urology, plastics and paediatrics
• Robotics platform, since da Vinci experience is asked for specifically

We also ask about call. Perioperative call expectations vary enormously between facilities and are one of the most common causes of a contract not matching what the nurse understood.

What facilities should tell us

The more precise the requisition, the faster the fill. Useful detail includes the service lines running in the rooms being covered, the case volume and typical day length, whether the role is circulating, scrubbing or both, the call requirement and how it is compensated, the preference card and inventory system in use, and the robotics platform if applicable.

A requisition for "OR RN" with none of that will produce submissions that look qualified on paper and fail on day one.

Surgical technologists

Frequently the harder half of a perioperative gap and often overlooked when a facility describes the problem as a nursing shortage. We place certified surgical technologists on the same terms as nursing staff, screened by the same service line questions, with certification through NBSTSA where the role requires it.

Sterile processing is the quieter dependency. A theatre schedule collapses when instrument turnaround fails, and SPD roles are consistently harder to fill than their profile suggests.

For perioperative staff

OR experience does not transfer in or out easily, which cuts both ways. It narrows your options relative to a med-surg nurse, and it makes you considerably harder to replace, which is reflected in demand.

Before accepting, confirm the service lines you will actually be assigned to, the call requirement including frequency and pay, whether you are expected to scrub as well as circulate, and what orientation covers. Ask specifically whether you will be placed in rooms outside your service lines, since that is the perioperative equivalent of floating and it carries the same risk.

Our note on questions to ask a recruiter covers the general terms worth pinning down.