Reason Why Surgical Tech is the Best Kept Career Secret

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From the hallways of a hospital or other type of medical facility, the public never sees many of the behind the scenes departments and their teaming groups of professionals who cause the machine to run. Departments like the operating room, some delivery rooms, radiology, and other places one might see a surgical tech may never be seen from regular people who don’t have a clue they exist.

The operating room is like a separate world. Since no unauthorized personnel is admitted, even many of the other hospital employees don’t even realize the surgical tech is busy mending broken bones and stamping out disease.

Characteristics

With limited access to a visual arena, the operating room is a hidden location of peril. It takes a special kind of person to work in an operating room. This person needs to be a little bit of all of the following: organized, compassionate, easy to work with, steadfast, obsessive-compulsive about sterile technique, and an excellent troubleshooter and dishwasher. The thing about the operating room is unless you know someone or have watched Grey’s Anatomy, you would never know what’s going on in there.

The Subject

Here, the subject being the surgical technologist, we look at how the tech position ever came into being. The role of the surgical technologist began on the battlefields in World War I and World War II when the United States army used “medics” to work under the direct supervision of the surgeon. Concurrently, medical corpsman was used in the United States Navy aboard combat ships. Nurses were not allowed on the battlefield or aboard combat ships at the time. This led to the new profession within the military called operating room technicians.

Education

This new technician position was advanced in a difficult way by the tech having to learn in the field by the seat of his or her pants with whatever supplies were available. Eventually, when the troops came back from overseas, the profession bled over into the civilian world and further developed.

There has been a serious glitch in the advancement of education for technicians such as these, however. When the surgical technologist programs were set up, for some reason they were set up under a “certificate” program. This placed hardworking individuals somewhat lower in the pay scale and in the pecking order among registered nurses who were getting advanced degrees and able to move up the ladder accordingly. For years, there has been jealousy, competition and an imaginary line drawn between the two entities.

Many members of the professional organizations for these technicians have gone to state legislatures to bring them up in the credentialing process to a registry standard requiring licensure just like the registered nurses. Many times the surgical technologist can perform the nurses’ duties, but the nurses are not trained to perform the tech’s duties.

Another problem is among the state boards of higher education. It would be better for the technicians, if these boards would insist that this entity be a degree program across the board, so surgical techs could rise to the level of professionalism and equality that they so deserve.