Emily Sopko, CNP, outlines procedures she assists with in urology

In this video, Emily Sopko, CNP, describes the most common procedures/treatments she assists with in the urology department. Sopko is a nurse practitioner with University Hospitals Urology Institute in Cleveland, Ohio.

Transcription:

What are the most common procedures or treatments you assist with in the urology department?

Most of the procedures I do [are] something at the bedside. Often, we can do flexible cystoscopies for difficult Foley placements, or if we need to remove an indwelling stent at the bedside, I can assist with those things. I don't personally go into the OR, but we do have a couple of PAs in the inpatient setting who will go and do the robot assist portion of some of those cases. They can do the lap assist, and they can also help with those open cases. Perhaps, if there's not enough resident coverage, or a lot of times the residents like learning how to do the bedside robotic helping, but after a while, it gets a little bit boring for them, and they're ready to move on to something more challenging. That's where our PAs really come in handy; they love that. They love being at the bedside, assisting on the robot. They love to teach the residents how to do the bedsiding for the robot. So that's been a newer role with our team within the past 2 or so years, that we have been able to enhance our team that way. And the residents have really appreciated it. And I think our PAs are really satisfied with that part of the job, so they do a little bit more of that assisting.

We also do priapism takedowns. We'll do scrotal abscesses. Those are probably the major bedside procedures that I can think of in an inpatient setting. In the outpatient setting, we don't, as of this moment, have our own APPs that are doing independent office cystoscopies, but that's part of our future. We've gotten some feedback from our APP team, which is, including myself, about 12 strong, that they'd like to start learning to do those things. Some of our urogyn colleagues do PTNS for overactive bladder. They do injection teaching for testosterone, or erectile dysfunction. Those are really the majors that we do. We don't do any big procedures, per se. Over in pediatrics, they do help with circumcisions as well. That's a big part for the peds APPs is they can often just do those at the bedside completely independently, which is great.

This transcript was edited for clarity.