Hospital executives would say my research was outdated, but I was
really strict about not having research older than 5 years. None of my
articles were biased, and I didn't take any research from vendors. My
advice: Do your research, avoid bias, and be prepared to back up your
assertions with recent peer-reviewed science.
2. Sell it organically
In our situation, it was a PR effort of sorts to get smoke evacuation
over the goal line. My partner in our smoke evacuation push, assistant
nurse manager Jim Wade, RN, BSN, CN, and I often teamed up in a
sort of "good cop, bad cop" routine (I was the bad cop) to get our
message across. We went from discipline to discipline in our health
system, evangelizing and winning hearts and minds to our cause. Our
mix of sugar and spice proved effective.
We focused on finding surgeons to champion smoke evacuation. I
tried to understand how a surgeon wouldn't want to protect their staff.
People think surgeons are in the OR 40 hours a week; they aren't.
Usually, it's once a week, so they aren't as affected by smoke as much as
other surgical staff are.
My philosophy is to take an organic approach. You can't just tell sur-
geons they need to run this machine. You need frontline staff to
explain it to them: "Hey, this is my health here. You can choose
whether or not I breathe in these chemicals." It wasn't me going into
ORs and shaming surgeons. It wasn't me putting a policy into place
immediately. It was Jim and I letting it grow organically.
Jim would tell a surgeon, "Come in my office." We had all our arti-
cles geared toward surgeons ready to go, highlighted. One doctor took
the articles home overnight; he'd been refusing smoke evac for over a
decade. The next day, he called Jim and said, "Where's my smoke
evacuator? You don't want me to expose all these people to surgical
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