The Weyburn General Hospital has two operating theatres, staffed with qualified personnel with state-of-the-art equipment for a variety of procedures - but the facility is not getting the level of usage it should be, says the O.R. staff, and this in turn affects the entire hospital facility.

There is a complement of trained local staff for the operating rooms, plus Weyburn has access to some excellent surgeons who travel here from Regina to provide expertise, in addition to the general surgeons already in place here.

The heart of any hospital is its operating rooms, said one of the OR staff, and people need to be more aware of what is available here.

"A doctor made the analogy. He said for a hospital to exist you need an OR. It's like a tree; the OR is the roots of the facility, and everything grows from the roots. If the OR is busy, everything is busy," said OR nurse Nancy Styles, explaining that a busy OR means the whole team of personnel at the hospital is kept busy, including the lab and lab techs, X-ray, wards for recovery, including the maternity ward, and all the support staff and services provided by the hospital.

"It's very important to keep the OR operating. The status of the hospital would change if you didn't have it. Even something simple like a dislocated shoulder, you'd have to be put under and transported to Regina to have it done," added OR charge nurse Coreen Ward.

Ward is the charge nurse for the OR, and under her are OR nurses Delinda Onstad, Carol Anderson, Tracey Rothwell and Styles, with Brenda Freeman the nurse manager for all nurses in the hospital.

To be an OR nurse, there is training over and above the requirement to be a registered nurse.

"To have the designation of OR nurse, you have to take additional training through SIAST to get the advanced certificate, on which you have to get a minimum of 80 per cent, and you have to pass the practicum," said Ward, noting the practicum is carried out in a major large-city hospital.

In addition to the nurses, there are the CSR technicians, or Central Supply Room, including Janet Olson and Shelley Wanner, who are in charge of ensuring every piece of equipment used for operating is sterile and available for the use of the surgeons.

Some of the surgical specialists who travel here include a gynecologist from Regina who provides major and minor surgery, a general surgeon from Regina, a dental surgeon from Carlyle, and a general surgeon who will start here in January but will be based in Estevan. Locally there are two general surgeons, and a staff of three anesthetists.

The anesthetic machine is state-of-the-art, and has to be maintained at the same standards of any major hospital in Regina or Saskatoon. It is checked by a biomedical technician every three months to ensure it continues to operate properly.

Besides being under-used, the O.R. is also under-funded, and resources are limited. The facility and equipment are here to do more, such as arthroscopic surgery on knees, for example, but the hospital recently lost the use of a surgeon qualified to do the work.

"You hear of services that people go to Regina to have done; they may not know that they could have these procedures done here," said Ward.

"We are blessed to have these surgeons come down here. It save people having to be driven into Regina for a minor day surgery; they can have it here and be home the same day," added nurse Nancy Styles. She notes that even for a minor day procedure, if the patient has to be put under, they have to have someone else drive them home, and this would be much easier from the Weyburn hospital for many people than from Regina.

Another attraction for having a procedure done here is the personal attention from staff that you won't get in a large city hospital, due mainly to the volume of operations they have to do, said Ward.

Some of the procedures that can be performed here include hysterectomies, gall bladder surgery, hernia repairs, gastroscopies, colonoscopies, carpal tunnel surgery, tonsillectomy, vasectomies, tubal ligations, plus emergency surgery such as appendectomies or caesarian sections, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"There's always two nurses and physicians on call to provide emergency surgery, or if someone has a broken bone or a dislocated shoulder, or anything where a person has to be put under. This eliminates the need for that person to be taken to Regina to have it done," said Styles.

Some of the top-of-the-line equipment available here include laproscopic and endoscopic equipment, which was purchased through large estate gifts to the hospital. These pieces of equipment enable less-intrusive surgery to be performed through use of a tiny camera that can be inserted either through the navel or down the throat. The result is the patient can have a much shorter recovery time as the incision is much smaller than with a customary surgical procedure.