When it comes to filling OR nursing positions, finding candidates who can fit into that environment is one challenge, and getting them up to speed quickly is another. Perioperative nurse leaders and educators at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, have found it worthwhile to invest in their surgical technologists…

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Concerted efforts to reduce readmissions have paid off at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia. Among its bragging rights since launching an initiative last year: decreased length of stay for colorectal surgery patients and a downward trend in readmissions. To learn how they did it, OR Manager spoke with…

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Building healthy relationships between leaders and employees is vital to the success of any organization. It’s especially important in perioperative services because of the teamwork needed to provide safe patient care. OR leaders must invest in their employees by fostering trust, job embeddedness, and employee commitment, empowerment, and accountability.  …

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Avoiding preventable harm in the OR is the goal of any surgical services department, and meeting that goal requires excellent communication and collaboration among staff members. At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Safe Care in the OR Everytime (SCORE) project has raised awareness about safety and engaged front-line…

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Certain words and phrases are used frequently in nursing—sometimes so frequently that their true meaning is lost. For some, the term “shared governance” is one of those. What is shared governance? “A dynamic staff-leader partnership that promotes collaboration, shared decision making, and accountability for improving quality of care, safety, and…

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Every perioperative services staff member, at every level, contributes to the success or failure of the department. Exceptional leaders understand this, and they are most successful when they discourage intimidation and invite everyone to take ownership of their roles. Teamwork in the OR is the next frontier in quality perioperative…

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Providing dependably excellent care for all patients all of the time is the essence of high reliability healthcare, as defined by the Joint Commission in its 2013 report. Two large health systems—Kaiser Permanente and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital—are on the path to becoming highly reliable organizations. In recent years, improved processes…

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Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) is renowned for patient care, but by early 2013 the increased complexity of new technology and other factors had eroded efficiency. Orthopedics had fallen to the bottom quartile compared to national benchmarks for turnover times, and executive leadership called for change. Within orthopedic surgery,…

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The expanded volume of interventional cardiology in recent years has played a major role in the growing prevalence of hybrid ORs. As a result, many perioperative services leaders have had to develop systems for managing hybrid ORs along with traditional ORs. “Management of hybrid ORs is really a collision of…

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Huddles are hot. Experts cite them as effective patient safety tools, and many hospitals have implemented them on nursing units at the start of the shift. The perioperative services team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, broadened the huddle concept to include several disciplines and a structured format,…

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