QUICK REFERENCE Staff can quickly flip to important phone numbers and policies.

AT A GLANCE
Pocket Guides Put Info at Your Fingertips

All the information your surgical team needs is kept somewhere — in binders or notepads, online, on hallway posters or sticky notes — but wouldn't it be nice to give your staff quick and easy access to important phone numbers and facility policies in a pocket reference guide? Here's how an all-in-one guide can improve patient care and help maintain clinical efficiencies.

Discuss what information your clinical team wants in the guide; they're the ones who'll be using it on a daily basis and know what they need to flip to quickly. Distill their ideas into a list of commonly requested items for final inclusion. To give you some ideas, the info in ours includes phone numbers for X-ray, pathology and department managers; infection prevention guidelines; instructions for proper room cleaning; how to read sterility indicators; surgical wound classifications; how to print preference cards from our electronic health records; policies for managing OR visitors; and, our staff's favorite, a page for noting usernames, passwords and password hints for the online programs they access throughout the day.

You'll have to tweak the pocket guide's design using a desktop publishing system to ensure the info you want included fits properly, but here are some basic guidelines to follow when constructing your version:

• Fold an 8.5" by 11" paper in half to create 4-sided page spreads. The number of sheets used to create the guide must therefore be a multiple of 4 (we selected 24 sheets to start, for example).
• Set tight margins to include as much information as possible.
• Print the pages on a color printer; separate and stack them into individual guides; fold and trim the pages so the guide can fit in a scrub pocket (we found that 4.25" by 5.50" works well). Secure the pages with a few staples placed in the center spread.
• For durability, print the top sheet, which when folded will serve as the guide's front and back covers, on card stock and laminate it.
• Trim the lower right corner of the cover and the pages leading up to the list of commonly called phone numbers so staff can easily flip there.

Give copies to each member of your surgical team and all new employees. It's important to revisit and review the information the guide contains — we're on the 4th edition of ours — to ensure it's still accurate, relevant and useful.

Mary Lou Jackson, RN, MSN, CNOR
Stanford Hospitals and Clinics
Stanford, Calif.
[email protected]