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IDEAS THAT WORK
AT A GLANCE
Pocket Guides Put Info at Your Fingertips
All the information your surgical team needs is kept somewhere — in binders or notepads, online, on hallway posters or sticky notes — but wouldn't it be nice to give your staff quick and easy access to important phone numbers and facility policies in a pocket reference guide? Here's how an all-in-one guide can improve patient care and help maintain clinical efficiencies.
Discuss what information your clinical team wants in the guide; they're the ones who'll be using it on a daily basis and know what they need to flip to quickly. Distill their ideas into a list of commonly requested items for final inclusion. To give you some ideas, the info in ours includes phone numbers for X-ray, pathology and department managers; infection prevention guidelines; instructions for proper room cleaning; how to read sterility indicators; surgical wound classifications; how to print preference cards from our electronic health records; policies for managing OR visitors; and, our staff's favorite, a page for noting usernames, passwords and password hints for the online programs they access throughout the day.
You'll have to tweak the pocket guide's design using a desktop publishing system to ensure the info you want included fits properly, but here are some basic guidelines to follow when constructing your version:
• Fold an 8.5" by 11" paper in half to create 4-sided page spreads. The number of sheets used to create the guide must therefore be a
multiple of 4 (we selected 24 sheets to start, for example).
• Set tight margins to include as much information as possible.
• Print the pages on a color printer; separate and stack them into individual guides; fold and trim the pages so the guide can fit in a
