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My Experience of... Trauma and Orthopaedics

Featured Author:

Claudia McMonagle

Claudia has worked in the NHS for the past 11 years in a variety of areas, trusts and at different levels and has specialised in Trauma and Orthopaedics.
As an Orthopaedic Nurse Practitioner she has been involved in some research and has had abstracts and posters accepted for presentation and publication.
She has also co-written an information booklet on Pin Site Care. She is currently writing information booklets for patients.

More articles from this author:

• Tips on Defusing Situations with Difficult Patients
• Should We Follow The Rules Or Cut Corners?
• The Importance of a Bedside Manner for Nurses

In the second in this series of articles looking at the nursing experiences of our members, Claudia McMonagle explains why she choose to specialise in Trauma and Orthopaedics Nursing.

My very first placement as a student nurse was on an orthopaedic ward. It was a mixed ward which specialised in both trauma and elective patients. I fell in love with it immediately and preferred the trauma side more than the elective and knew that one day I wanted to be an orthopaedic nurse.

After my placement was finished, I was lucky enough to be told that there was a job here waiting for me when I qualified. I continued my training and experienced placements in a wide range of departments, such as Theatres and A&E, but orthopaedics was the speciality for me. When I qualified I took that job that was offered and haven’t looked back since.

Orthopaedics is a speciality that you either love or hate and it is often perceived as involving a lot of heavy lifting, but it really doesn’t. It is very busy and yes you do deal with a lot of elderly patients who have fractured their hips, or who are undergoing total hip replacements, but you also get a lot of younger patients with a variety of fractures. It’s a rewarding job and is a speciality that encompasses all of the other specialities e.g. respiratory, cardiac and vascular which makes it really interesting.

My passion for trauma developed further when I worked on the trauma ward of a top London hospital, seeing many varied cases. The air ambulance would come in and out all day with interesting cases. This role gave me a sense of job satisfaction at the end of the day and it was so nice, after admitting patients onto the ward who had multiple fractures and several other complications, that after a period of time (some were there 3 months) you would watch them being discharged from the ward and walk out the door. That is what makes the job so worthwhile. They come in broken and we fix them!

I left the wards and then worked as an Orthopaedic Nurse Practitioner based in a Trauma and Orthopaedic Outpatients Department. Here I set up and ran my own Nurse Led Clinics, working alongside the consultants. Some of my clinics included Arthroplasty Follow Up Clinic, Wound Care Clinic, IA Injection Clinic, External Fixator Clinic, Fracture Follow Up Clinic and Osteoporosis Clinic; the list of Nurse Led Clinics is endless!

In addition to these clinics I was also a Trauma Coordinator, which meant reviewing the orthopaedic patients that were on outlying wards to ensure that they were being reviewed by the teams and to assist the staff with any problems that they had.

During my career I have also been lucky to undertake research relating to orthopaedics in particular Nurse Led Clinics and to have abstracts accepted for presentation and publishing. Orthopaedics has evolved over the years and still remains as challenging and rewarding today as it did years ago.

There are opportunities for nurses to further develop their careers to become Nurse Practitioners or Nurse Consultants and to even become Surgical Assistants and perform minor operations such as Carpel Tunnel Decompression.

The possibilities in Orthopaedics are endless!

Claudia McMonagle December 2008

Other articles in this series include My Experience of…Theatre Nursing by Mo Mossman.