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When Joanna Schubert, Clinical Manager for the Civic Campus Operating Room, was in nursing school, she never dreamed that she’d learn to read blueprints and need a hard hat as part of her work.

When Joanna Schubert walked into the new endovascular Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) suite after the storage cabinets were installed, she immediately spotted the problem.

Still under construction at the Civic Campus, the two new 1,000-square-foot suites will be for vascular surgery, but all the storage cabinets had shelves that didn’t allow the long vascular stents to hang. Schubert had to ensure the correct cabinets would be installed.

That quick eye for detail and her clinical knowledge is why Schubert, Clinical Manager of the Civic Campus Operating Room, was asked two years ago to work with the construction teams to ensure that the needs of doctors, nurses, diagnostic imaging technicians and other clinical staff were taken into account when designing, building and outfitting the suites. Along the way, she acquired steel-toed construction shoes and a hard hat, and learned to read blueprints, elevations, electrical charts, ventilation plans, building codes and more.

“They don’t teach that in nursing school,” she said. She picked up some of those skills when she performed a similar role before the surgical suites in the Critical Care Wing at the General Campus opened in 2007 with its 17 state-of-the-art ORs.

“The role of a nurse never stays as just a caregiver,” she said. “As the clinical expert, you have to think of the flow through the area and how it’s going to be used. You have to keep going in there frequently. You don’t want to move into a space and find out the electrical plugs are in the wrong space.”

As well as ensuring the room is built and set up to provide efficient and safe workspaces for staff, she will also help coordinate training for the interprofessional teams who will work there – a team approach that was effectively used when setting up the robotic program. And she sought input from all OR staff on paint colours and the mural in the hallway.

Taking on this role requires technical savvy as well as the ability to troubleshoot – something she said OR nurses tend to be good at anyhow because they’re critical thinkers. She has enjoyed this challenging aspect to nursing that she had never dreamed would be part of her job.

“I like to do different things like that. There’s a sense of accomplishment and pride when you open the doors, pride in having had a say in it.”

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