BY THE BOOK Contributing policies and procedures gives staff ownership of the binders.

Learn By Doing
Let Your Staff Write Your Policies

Clinical practice is a work in progress, a constant state of evolution, so it's incumbent upon a facility to write (or rewrite) policies and procedures when management and staff learn, add or acquire new steps or techniques. Our staff has a combined total of more than 450 years' worth of experience: Why should we limit this task to the same people on the same committee each time?

I assign the job of drafting practice documents to different staff members, then I ask someone who's not in their department to read them. If these new eyes can understand the details, I know they're clear. Delegating the process makes new hires into experts and keeps our longtime vets on their toes. Also, it's a way of giving them ownership of our policies and procedures, which are no longer just the fat binders on the shelf that we refer to before surveys, but our facility's operating instructions that our staff had a hand in preparing.

Patricia H. Stibbs
Plastic Surgery Center of Hampton Roads
Newport News, Va.
[email protected]