Celebrating ODP Day 2026: A Day in the Life of Our Theatre Team

May 13, 2026/Awareness days, General News

To mark ODP Day, we’re sharing a behind-the-scenes look at our Operating Department Practitioners at The McIndoe Centre, highlighting the vital role they play in delivering safe, high-quality patient care across our theatres.

The video follows our ODP team through a typical day across anaesthetics, scrub, and recovery.

In anaesthetics, the team are responsible for preparing the airway equipment room and ensuring the anaesthetic machine is fully checked and ready for each patient.

In scrub, they prepare sterile instruments and equipment and don sterile attire to support surgical procedures.

In recovery, the focus is on patient safety, with airway rescue equipment, monitoring systems, and essential medications prepared to support patients as they wake from anaesthesia.

Beyond the technical expertise, the team reflect on what makes the role so rewarding. They highlight the variety the role offers and the constant opportunity to learn while working closely with a wide range of healthcare professionals.

A key aspect they value is the patient-facing nature of the role, taking time to speak with patients, provide reassurance, and help reduce anxiety at every stage of their surgical journey.

Our ODPs are an essential part of the theatre team, combining technical skill, teamwork, and compassionate care to support patients when they need it most.

ODPs work in the operating department, hence the name operating department practitioner. So we've got three main areas. We've got anaesthetics, we've got scrub and we've got recovery. For anaesthetics, we'll be preparing airway equipment and we'll be getting our machines ready. On the scrub side we'll be preparing our equipment trolleys with all of our sterile equipment while wearing our sterile clothes and counting to make sure it's all there. So at the moment I'm doing a scrub side. So in the morning we're coming in, we have a team brief. So we'll talking about the list we have, what procedure we'll be having. Once we know what the surgeon needs, what the whole team requires, then we go prepare the set to make sure everything is ready for surgery. And then in recovery it's a similar thing, we're making sure we've got airway rescue equipment for after they wake up and we're making sure we've got our monitoring ready and we've got some drugs ready as well. So what I enjoy the most, I must say I'm learning something new every day because you thought you know something but then you come back next day to something else that you actually surprised. You learn something new every day and then you get to work with different people, different healthcare professionals, so you actually pick up different skills. I like the fact that we're patient facing, it's nice to actually get to talk to people and reassure them and hopefully make their, what is a really scary experience, hopefully we can make that slightly less scary and make them a bit more happy about the whole thing.

News and articles

We offer a range of news and blog articles to enable people to make more informed decisions when it comes to the treatments we have at The McIndoe Centre.

See all articles