Geisinger, they found that the nurse and scrub tech would leave the
room at the end of a case and wait for housekeeping to arrive before
they started cleaning.
"If 4 rooms come down and you have only 2 housekeepers available
to clean, you can only do one person per room at that point," says Ms.
Soloski. "And you have 2 rooms sitting idle until someone can finish
one and go to the next. That adds to the turnover time."
They asked scrub techs to begin to bag up all the trash and put it
outside the room if housekeeping is not present at the room upon the
patient's departure. And once the RN has taken the patient to PACU,
they ask her to return to the room and help the scrub tech start the
clean-up and breakdown. This lets the cleaning process begin while
housekeeping is tied up in another room.
5. Ready your case carts
Have the case carts ready to go in advance. You don't want your nurses
running around between cases to pick up soft goods that aren't on the
case cart.
"Prior to the start of the day, the OR personnel should look at all
their case supplies for the day to include instruments and equipment,"
says Ms. Norman. "This helps organize the day so that they are not
looking for instruments and equipment in between cases."
Ms. Norman says that gathering your items in between each case
slows down the turnover time. "Organization and communication are
the keys to turnovers," she says.
There are two different processes for case carts at the 2 Geisinger
campuses. At one campus, the central sterile department is divided
into two parts, one of which does the decontamination and puts the
trays together; the other that picks the case carts. At the other campus,
soft goods get picked by the supply chain and then the trays for the
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