Center in Oak Ride, Tenn. "This gives
that OR extra hands to get the room
clean and set up for the next patient."
• Electronic boards. At Geisinger
Community Medical Center in
Scranton, Pa., electronic boards flash
a "final stitch" symbol — it's a little
needle and stitch — that alerts house-
keeping a few minutes in advance that
a room is coming down, says Ashley
Soloski, MHA, project manager for
surgical services at Geisinger.
• Prioritize room turnovers. You
can also anticipate where the tight
spots in a day's schedule will be, or
which high-volume surgeons need to
keep cases moving through their
assigned ORs. Cue in the rest of the surgical team by identifying
rooms that need rapid resetting between cases. Place red magnets on
the schedule whiteboard so staff and turnover teams can focus their
efforts on the suites you've identified as high priorities, says Carol
Fairchild, RN, BS, CASC, director of the Crane Center for Ambulatory
Surgery in Pittsfield, Mass.
2. Observe your turnover process
Look at what's actually going on, both the larger and smaller problems,
and identify issues that are causing any member of the team to be idle
before beginning a task, like waiting for housekeeping to clean the room.
At Geisinger, they observed from the time the patient was wheeled
out to when the next patient was wheeled in. What was everybody
4 2 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J U N E 2 0 1 9
•
NO
DUPLICATION
Focus
on
reducing
duplicate
work.
Look
at
what's
actually
going
on
that
is
causing
delays.
Pamela
Bevelhymer,
RN,
BSN,
CNOR
