A Guide to Surgical Assisting

A lifetime of experience distilled for the budding student, training doctors, professional assistants, and surgeons

Surgical assisting is a unique skill. Specialist surgeons and senior registrars are often not very good assistants as their roles are entirely different to that of an assistant. Of course, as a surgical assistant, it is possible to get by just standing there and doing what you're told, but this doesn't really help the specialist surgeon and certainly won't give any satisfaction or pride to the assistant. Surgical assistants who have pride in their role and do that bit more are generally in high demand.

This guide should prove useful to medical students, HMO's, registrars, nurses, doctors who may occasionally be called on to assist in theatre and those that may intend to make surgical assisting a large part of their career.