Four teams revamp perioperative services
August 1, 2000 less than 1 minute read
Four teams revamp perioperative services
Pilot’ change becomes permanent strategy
While Palmetto Baptist Medical Center (PBMC) had satisfied customers in its perioperative service, the preoperative process at this Columbia, SC, facility left a lot of room for improvement.
In 1996, according to anecdotal reports, patients occasionally spent three to five hours on site prior to their surgery dates, to complete registration, testing, and a 41-minute interview — even when they had appointments.
Consultants provided benchmarking
According to Lynn Wythe, RN, MSN, nursing director of perioperative services, patients complained daily. "When they told their doctors about the long waits, we heard about it!" The chief goals of an improvement initiative launched in late 1996 were to improve customer satisfaction with the surgeons as well as the patients and to increase market share. Currently, the annual volume is 18,000 cases a year; 85% are outpatient procedures.
Although earlier improvement efforts had been made, staff were too deeply immersed in the routine demands of pre-op testing and interviews to effectively step back and assess how to improve the process.
One critical difference in the recent effort was the engagement of improvement service consultants from the VHA, based in Irving, TX. Their benchmarking and best-practice information were "exactly what we needed to help us understand how to improve the process," says Wythe. "They did tons of leg work for us."
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