Operating department practitioner at Health Education and Improvement Wales

The job at Health Education and Improvement Wales

Operating department practitioners are perioperative specialists who look after patients through the three phases of surgery. In anaesthetics they prepare drugs, airway equipment and monitoring and assist the anaesthetist at induction and emergence. In the surgical phase they scrub, manage instruments and swab counts, and act as the circulating link between the theatre team and the rest of the hospital. In recovery they monitor airway, breathing, circulation and pain until the patient is safe to return to the ward. Patients of all ages undergoing planned or emergency surgery and other procedures requiring anaesthesia, alongside surgeons, anaesthetists, theatre nurses and support workers.

At a specialist trust such as Health Education and Improvement Wales, that work means a concentrated specialist caseload, referred in from a wide area because the care needed is beyond what a district general hospital provides. Posts here are more often specialist from appointment than rotational, and some specialist centres recruit at band 6 where the work requires prior experience. Across the profession as a whole, operating department practitioners work in settings including NHS operating theatres, day surgery units, anaesthetic rooms and post-anaesthetic care, intensive care and emergency department — an organisation of this type will run some of those services and not others, which is why two posts with the same job title in the same city can be very different jobs.

Pay is not an employer decision. Agenda for Change is negotiated nationally and set separately in each of the four nations, so Health Education and Improvement Wales pays band 5 exactly what every other NHS employer in Wales pays it: £32,557 at the bottom of the band on the 2026/27 scale. For context, median full-time pay across all occupations in Wales was £35,796 in 2025. What genuinely differs between two employers is the caseload, how rotations are structured, how much protected time you get for supervision and continuing professional development, how much band 6 progression is built into the establishment, and how far you travel between sites. Those are the questions worth asking at interview.

This page states no figure specific to Health Education and Improvement Wales because none is published in the open data. When the workforce and staff survey feeds include this organisation, the establishment size, the response rate and the theme scores will appear above.