CROWD CONTROL Use our online worksheet to contain your staffing costs.

In surgery, staffing costs are your No. 1 or No. 2 expenditure, yet the OR labor budget usually takes a back seat to supplies and equipment. I've developed a spreadsheet to help you determine whether you're over- or understaffed. As a special service to Outpatient Surgery readers, the Excel worksheet we dissect on the opposite page is programmed online to do the calculations for you. Download the worksheet at outpatientsurgery.net/forms.

Creating staffing metrics
Before plugging numbers into the "Staffing Hours Budget Worksheet," it helps to visualize and quantify staffing patterns. Make a schematic drawing of your facility's pre- and post-op areas and ORs. Don't worry about how it looks — it's simply a functional diagram intended to show the locations of patient-care areas. Sit down with your clinical managers and think about how many staff members are needed and where they work during each day of a typical week based on the cases you host and the surgeons who operate. One RN might be able to supervise 2 medical assistants in post-op on Thursday mornings because Dr. Tortoise works slowly, but you might need 2 RNs to work recovery on Thursday afternoons when the pace picks up. Trust me, sitting down with your supervisory staff and assessing patient flow and staffing patterns for different days is a valuable practice in coming up with accurate maximum and minimum staffing levels.

Click the image to download the PDF instruction sheet.

No standing around
Review this worksheet monthly with your staff and managers to gain an understanding of how a certain number of hours "feels" on the front line. Do staff feel overworked? Are they often able to leave early? Use their feedback and the hard numbers you've generated to adjust your staffing levels. I've used these steps to great success in several facilities. If you need any help with the process, shoot me an e-mail and I'll be glad to walk you through it. OSM