Outpatient Surgery Magazine

OR Excellence 2019 Awards - September 2019 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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6 6 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9 T here were boxes of suture hiding everywhere at AdventHealth Surgery Center Lenexa (Kan.), some opened and some outdated, some stored on the big suture cart and some stored on smaller suture carts, enough suture to stitch a thousand incisions and to sink a supply room budget. "We had multiple open boxes of the same suture stored on 4 suture carts in multiple locations," says Valerie Heckmaster, MBA, BSN, RN, CNOR, the charge nurse who won the OR Excellence Award for Financial Management for taming the overstocked suture situation at her 4-OR facility. When suture expired, as it often would, staff would remove and dis- card an average of 15-20 boxes at a time — some expired boxes were still sealed, says Ms. Heckmaster, adding that the vicious cycle would repeat itself when materials management automatically reordered the FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT Taming a Tangled Suture Inventory Bringing order to a disorderly suture supply — on a single suture cart in a single location. Dan O'Connor | Editor-in-Chief • STITCH IN TIME Valerie Heckmaster, MBA, BSN, RN, CNOR, charge nurse at AdventHealth Surgery Center Lenexa (Kan.), whipped her facility's unwieldy suture inventory into shape. AdventHealth Surgery Center Lenexa (Kan.)

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