Healthcare support workers and the scrubbed role

The scrubbed role is highly valued amongst many theatre nurses. A survey by Roberts (1989) found that 61.9% of 147 nurses stated that they preferred the scrubbed role to an anaesthetic role (4.8%). There is more recent evidence that nursing still dominates the scrubbed role, with over 50% of 108 nurses surveyed stating that they only worked in the scrubbed area of the operating department (Hind 1997).