Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
Issue link: http://outpatientsurgery.uberflip.com/i/685863
J U N E 2 0 1 6 O R E X C E L L E N C E . C O M 3 7 well as organizations. Departments of surgery have their own meetings, and departments of anesthesia have their meetings, and nursing has their meetings, but when does everybody ever get together to talk and practice as a team? We've known for 20 years that it's all about teamwork. But for the most part, people don't do it. They operate in silos. • The silo effect. When people don't communicate well, errors happen. And sometimes they're tragic errors. Nearly all of the Joint Commission Sentinel Reports involve failures to communicate. How is that possible in an industry with some of the brightest people in the world? • Practice teamwork. Great teams know you have to practice together as a team, because you have to learn how to anticipate each other, you have to understand each other's body language and you have to understand how people are thinking. Great athletes and musicians don't practice on their own. They practice as a team. • Dealing with conflict. There are great programs out there that help people learn how to speak to others respectfully and handle conflict effectively, but you can't just give people a course. You've got to do something on a regular basis. Maybe once a year take your entire OR staff somewhere and work on communication skills. Then maybe come back together as a group once a month and practice working through issues by using effective dialogue. Create scenarios and give people positions and have them work through how to do conflict. Conflict isn't necessarily bad. You want to have some conflict. But you've got to be able to handle it constructively. If you can't, people won't want to talk to each other. Without communication, there's no accountability, and without accountability you're not going to have results. OSM