Recovery Room and CSS

A child is wheeled out of the OR and towards the recovery room. 

On a typical day, the CAMTA surgical team can see up to four paediatric and four adult cases, totalling eight surgeries daily. Once a surgery is over, the patients are wheeled out to the recovery room for their initial post-operative care. There, the recovery room nurses monitor many different things to ensure the patient's well-being and their comfort. 

Pauline Worsfold (recovery nurse) is soothing Eileen in the recovery room. The baby was concentrated on one thing : suckling. She tried to latch on to anything that protruded, hoping it produced milk.

Francisco Gallardo (translator) supports a child in the recovery room. Because Spanish is his first language, his cultural sensitivity comes through beautifully with the children. 

In the meantime, all surgical tools and instruments also have to be taken out of the OR. Everything has to be counted and inventoried before it is brought to the CSS to be scrubbed and sterilized. The sterilization process involves multiple steps. The instruments have to be scrubbed in three different solutions. Each step of the process requires the lay person to examine each tool for any left over bone pieces, fatty matter or blood – it is especially important in orthopaedic surgery because bone fragments stay stuck on tools (like rasps, drill bits or reamers). The instruments then have to be dried and sorted into various sets. 

The lay people have a long list of tasks to accomplish daily, the main one being the CSS process. Anyone with a bit of free time is encouraged to lend them a hand. 

Because they contain so much, and because it is crucial that all the necessary tools are accounted for, the lay people and OR nurses follow visual instructions from the “picking books”. Those books have been created by the CAMTA OR nurses to clarify the layout in each set. The sets are wrapped, sealed and put in the autoclave. The sets are identical to the ones used in Edmonton and contain all the instruments that surgeons may need in a surgery. 

Veronica Kong (Executive Director) and Jackie Wiebe (Administrator) are often found helping out in the CSS.

Once perfectly cleaned and reassembled, the sets make their way back to the OR… it is only when you see all the tools layed out in front of a nurse and ready for use by the surgeons that you really measure the importance of the CSS task and the amount of instruments cleaned daily.