and then you hear about how a big budget item that was supposed to
improve a facility's workflow is now abandoned and gathering dust in
storage. You wonder, "What were they thinking?" The answer is, they
didn't ask what others were thinking.
Unless you're running your facility as a dictatorship, seek input from
everyone. Build a committee made up not just of managers, but also
of OR nurses and techs, sterile processing techs, even housekeepers.
You have to have the front-line staff on board, because they're the
ones who are going to be loading, pushing, unloading and washing the
carts. Without their voices of approval, implementation won't be easy.
Making carts work for you
There's a lot of preparation in a day's caseload. Ideally, you're aiming
for some sort of assembly-line flow to keep supplies moving and
organized. The case carts you choose can make a big difference in
how productively your staff is able to set up a case.
First of all, you need to know your workflow. How many ORs do you
have going at the same time? How many cases do you see in a day?
You'll need more than 1 cart per room, and possibly 3 per room: 1 serv-
ing the case that's in the OR, 1 being washed in central sterile and 1
being filled for the next case.
Does the day's schedule consists of a few major cases or many
minor ones? This can determine which size of cart would be most effi-
cient to use. Or, since smaller cases may only require a small tray of
instruments and minimal supplies, you could organize the needs of
the next several cases into a tall cart parked outside the OR door and
ready to go. If you're buying multiple carts, mixing and matching large
and small carts is not unheard of.
While open cart styles make it easy to see and gain access to a cart's
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