A Typical Day as a Recovery Room Aide

My typical work day as recovery room aide starts at 7:45 in the morning. The first thing in my morning isto get the computer up and running. I need to access the daily schedule in the computer and begin to prepare for the incoming patients. This is also the time of the day I contact patients by phone to remind them of their scheduled appointments.

The scope of being a recovery room aide entails me to assist in providing care to patients waking up from anesthia. Patients brought down from surgery are put under the care of either me or my assistant. A patients recovery time depends on whether that person had been anesthetized or not. As well as a host of other factors that can arise.

All patients who had been anesthetized required a driver to safely bring them home. An interesting fact is on more than one occasion the driver had to be brought to a separate room because they were going to faint after viewing the person they were caring for.

The care provided by a recovery room aide includes making sure the patient is not excessively bleeding, the driver understands the written instructions and they have the provided prescriptions in hand. It is also required that I do follow up calls during the day to see how the patient is doing and answer any questions the care giver has.

My job also includes informing the doctors if I see any problems while watching over the patients. On occasion a patient does not immediately wake up or they have a delayed, adverse reaction to the anesthesia given. Another problem is an increased sign of bleeding.For each of these scenarios, I need to interrupt whatever procedure the doctor was working on in order to get some offical direction on how to handled the problem. A lot of times intravenous drugs are required , so I must prepare the IV equipment. When the IV treatment or requirement is done, the recovery room aide is responsible for removing the IV needle, along with bandaging.  

A major componet of my job is making sure the patient leaving has recovered enough to safely exit. It is not unusual to send the patients out in a wheel chair in order to safely get them to their car. The patient exit is generally when my day is done. Officially the work day would end around 5 once all follow up calls were done, but not always. There were always those emergencies that could arise.