Become a theatre practitioner
People with no experience or qualifications
Information on how to become an operating department practitioner, including the duties, training and registration requirements can be found on the NHS website here.
Experienced nurses
If you already have a nursing degree and want to move into theatre work, you will need to apply for a post in theatres directly. All nurses who go into theatres tend not to have any previous training except what they have done in their pre-registration courses.
It may help if you have made an effort to educate yourself with regard to theatres by undertaking:
- some study by reading up on perioperative care
- attending study days, or
- undertaking specific modules
Once you have a post in theatres you can then usually access courses via your local university which may well be funded by your employer. ODP courses can be found on the NHS coursefinder.
It is difficult to do university courses prior to gaining a post as they all have a practice and a theory component to the assessment. You would therefore need to be working in a perioperative environment already or be enrolling on a course without being in prior employment.
Join AfPP
A good place to start would be to think about becoming an AfPP member as you could then access:
- Journal of Perioperative Practice article archive (1998 - onwards)
- EBSCO host - an online resource which allows access to more than 600,000 articles dating back to 1982
- Online education modules
- Reduced rates at study days
- and much more.....
Or, you could always attend one of our study days as a non-member first? Upcoming dates can be found here.
Full membership details can be found here or you can call one of our membership team on 01423 881300.