A nurse with ideas

It’s been 11 years and over 500 surgeries since then,and finally Thakur has an international patent in her name — for designing the monopolar cautery point,a simple innovation from used surgical materials,that has made life simpler for neurosurgeons at the institute. The innovation has been published in the Indian Journal of Neurosurgery’s March 2012 issue. “When I first took the instrument to the then head of the department,he laughed at me. He inspected the instrument and then simply asked,‘do you dream of neurosurgery even when you sleep?’,” Nirmal laughs. Over the last few months,she,with her “co-inventor” Dr Sarat Chandra,a professor of neurosurgery at the institute,has been modifying the instrument further to improve its durability,and make it more user friendly. “I have done about 600 procedures till now with the instrument. It is a very useful tool for transoral surgeries,” Dr Chandra says.

A graduate in nursing from AIIMS,Nirmal had always worked in the neurosurgery OT since she joined the institute in 1990. “When I was in Class XII at a Sarvodaya Vidyalaya in Punjabi Bagh,my school bus used to cross a small nursing home every day. I loved the nurses’ uniform. To be honest,that was the reason I was attracted to the profession,” she says jokingly,when asked why she chose this profession.

Reminiscing about her innovation,Nirmal recalls her first stop — the surgical waste unit of the hospital. Then began what she describes as a “wild goose chase for ideas”. After painstakingly rummaging through piles of used material,she finally found what she needed — a used rubber catheter,part of a suction tube and a common dissector,routinely used for surgeries. After several sleepless nights of sketching,she finally had “some ideas”. A series of simple innovations followed — getting someone from the engineering section to drill a hole in the dissector,purchasing simple screw and bolt from the market,and insulating the whole structure with rubber to make it shock-proof.

Now posted at the AIIMS Trauma Centre,Nirmal has been focusing her energies on nursing care for trauma victims. She coordinates two courses at the national level under the centre chief Dr M C Misra — basic emergency care,and management of acute wounds — for clinicians,nurses and police officials. She has also been appointed chairperson of an Indo-US collaborative effort for education of nurses,The Academy for Clinical Emergency Nursing,which is now in its second year of a three-month fellowship programme of training for nurses.