Operating department practitioner at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust

The job at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust

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 an acute trust such as Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, that work means an acute hospital caseload — inpatients on the wards, emergency and critical care, theatres and diagnostics, and hospital outpatient clinics, with the working day shaped by admissions, ward rounds and discharge planning. Newly qualified posts here are usually rotational: four to six months at a time in a different clinical area, which is how you find out what you want to specialise in before you commit. 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 Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust pays band 5 exactly what every other NHS employer in England pays it: £32,073 at the bottom of the band on the 2026/27 scale. For context, median full-time pay across all occupations in the South East was £39,983 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.