Theatre nurses currently face the greatest threat to their existence since the evolution of the theatre nursing role. Traditionally perceived as task-oriented and separatist, the nature of the current theatre nursing role has led to the operating department being devalued as a clinical placement for preregistration student nurses which has a consequent effect on recruitment and retention problems. This article examines what the nurse provides, or could provide, in the operating theatre. The themes are that theatre nurses must give due consideration to the short-term future of their clinical role in order to regain status in the hierarchy of mainstream nursing.

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Nursing Standard infection/how to series Why you should read this article: • To optimise your practice when undertaking temperature measurements at various sites • To understand the importance of measuring temperature to provide information about a patient's health and its role in diagnosis and patient monitoring • To enhance your knowledge of the factors that can influence the accuracy of temperature measurements How to measure a patient's temperature non-invasively

Social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, can increase the prioritisation of specific locations for cognitive processing. A previous study using a manual reaching task showed that, although both gaze and pointing cues altered target prioritisation (reaction times [RTs]), only pointing cues affected action execution (trajectory deviations). These differential effects of gaze and pointing cues on action execution could be because the gaze cue was conveyed through a disembodied head; hence, the model lacked the potential for a body part (i.e., hands) to interact with the target. In the present study, the image of a male gaze model, whose gaze direction coincided with two potential target locations, was centrally presented. The model either had his arms and hands extended underneath the potential target locations, indicating the potential to act on the targets (Experiment 1), or had his arms crossed in front of his chest, indicating the absence of potential to act (Experiment 2). Participants reached to a target that followed a nonpredictive gaze cue at one of three stimulus onset asynchronies. RTs and reach trajectories of the movements to cued and uncued targets were analysed. RTs showed a facilitation effect for both experiments, whereas trajectory analysis revealed facilitatory and inhibitory effects, but only in Experiment 1 when the model could potentially act on the targets. The results of this study suggested that when the gaze model had the potential to interact with the cued target location, the model's gaze affected not only target prioritisation but also movement execution.

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