Surgical Care Practitioner Practice: One Team's Journey Explored (Clinical FEATURE‪)‬

Surgical practice in the UK changed in 1993, when Suzanne Holmes and her cardiac surgical colleagues introduced the surgical care practitioner role (SCP). Within a consultant led extended surgical team, SCPs work alongside a variety of healthcare practitioners to provide safe patient care, meet service demands and educate the future surgical workforce. This article reviews the history of this development over the last fifteen years in the context of a busy orthopaedic department and discusses some unforeseen consequences. Operating theatre teams are nothing if not adaptable. In an emergency or during times of staff shortages, theatre practitioners have always turned their hands to holding a retractor, a leg or camera, without this actually being a 'legal' part of their role (Peysner 1996). Often this has led to misunderstanding, tension and at times the threat of censure (Hunt 1995) from within differing professional groups who make up the operating theatre team.