Effectively screening patients for COVID-19 is part of pre-op protocols as outpatient facilities across the country slowly begin performing elective procedures again....

Healthcare professionals don't do well sitting still. If your staff is faced with too much free time during the COVID-19 crisis, look for non-clinical tasks that need to be done...

If a survey uncovers an issue that will take a lot of effort (time and money) to solve, always ask the surveyor if there’s an easier way to make the fix and still be...

It’s been nearly two months since the coronavirus began to invade every facet of our day-to-day lives. Heck, it virtually shut down our very livelihood when elective...

A one-word sign on a fleet of fluid waste management carts lets your OR team know which devices have been emptied and cleaned and which ones haven’t. After we...

Members of our surgical team were particularly grossed out about wearing thyroid shields others had worn during procedures involving intraoperative imaging....

I In our endoscopy department, we make a MESSSS first thing in the morning. The acronym, which we discovered through SGNA, makes it easy to remember the agenda...

Reprocessing technicians have one of the most important jobs in an endoscopy center. The complicated and detailed task of cleaning and reprocessing multiple scopes...

When the coronavirus outbreak caused a shortage of personal protective equipment at our hospital, we jumped at the chance to help and developed the prototype for a DIY...

High-volume surgery centers need to take advantage of any operational enhancements they can to stay ahead of the game. That's why we've become proactive about IV starts...

I love to sketch and draw in my free time, so during pre-op clinic visits I ask patients what kind of drawing they want me to make on the bandages I'll place over their scars...

Looking for a better way to organize your inventory of frozen tissue grafts? To improve efficiency when preparing for a case, we developed a system that involves placing...

When surveyors come knocking, the worst thing you can do is keep them waiting while you scramble around searching to find the documents they asked to see. That's why...

In addition to marking the correct surgery site, we always place patients' ID and allergy wristbands on the side thier surgeries will be performed. It's a simple safety check that...

Our PACU staff used to ask that question a lot because we didn't have a designated place to put them. When patients handed over their glasses in pre-op, we'd affix...

We use a free game app (kahoot.com) to turn ho-hum staff meetings into fun, interactive learning sessions. It's easy to input a series of multiple choice or true-false...

Patient satisfaction surveys and comments from providers trying to communicate with patients indicated that the ambient noise in our small pre/post-operative area was...

Our facility knew the benefits of administering IV acetaminophen preoperatively to reduce post-op pain, but it was always in short supply or cost prohibitive....

The one- and two-gram IV piggyback infusion bags of the antibiotic cefazolin we were using exclusively in 2018 were almost always on backorder and delivery...

Over the past few years, a number of employees who work in our health system's outpatient surgery center have become new moms. When they returned...