Haven't seen your administrators in years?
Haven't seen your administrators in years?
Taking them on a tour helps with capital requests
Has it been years since your facility's top administrators have been in your same-day surgery department? Are they clueless about what you're asking for when capital budget time rolls around?
Make an appointment for your administrators to tour your same-day surgery department, advises Caren Safstrom, RN, BSN, MSA, CNA, director of perioperative services at Lakeland Regional Health System in St. Joseph, MI. Safstrom recently attended the Same-Day Surgery conference in Palm Beach, FL, and shared this idea with other attendees.
What's the payoff? The employees, who are part of a three-hospital system, know who the senior managers are. The staff and surgeons now have open communications lines with the top administrators.
"And for new projects that surgery wants, it's helped us expedite them through the bureaucracy because they can understand what surgery is doing," Safstrom says.
Whether they realize it, it's critical for administrators to spend time in your area, says Tony Lennen, president and CEO of Major Hospital in Shelbyville, IN. "I spend 80% of my time doing that," he says. "Why people would want to be in a job dealing with hundreds of families and not want to mingle seems incongruous to me."
Lennen has heard some employees complain that they haven't seen their administrator in more than 10 years, except at employee meetings.
While acknowledging it's easier to find time for tours at a smaller hospital, he says, "Even if it is gimmicky, you've got to come up with way to get them involved. I think you've got to take the initiative to get them down and see what happens."
Here's how Safstrom conducted the tours:
First, she sent an e-mail appointment message to her chief executive officer and chief financial officer. She thought the two would be more comfortable making the tour together, she says.
"We invited them to share in the progress that surgery had made," Safstrom says.
On the day of the tour, one of the male assistive personnel showed them where to change into scrubs. Yes, scrubs. "We choose not to have them put jumpsuits on," she says. "We wanted them to have the OR environment."
All of the staff, including doctors, were notified ahead of time about the tour. "Surgeons saw them there, and they started talking to them. Staff started to really open up and talk to them."
The tour, which included all of the operating rooms, holding areas, and the central processing area at the primary campus, was held just before the capital budget process began. Administrators had the opportunity to see the equipment. For example, the OR needed new scrub sinks, which cost about $7,000 each. "My CFO could see exactly what I was talking about," Safstrom says.
Although the CEO and CFO originally had planned to tour the area for 1.5 hours, they ended up spending 2.5 hours in the surgery areas, she says.
The tour included a light lunch. Safstrom arranged for some staff to eat with the administrators, and the chief of anesthesiology joined the group. "We could talk about things at our level," she says. The day after the CEO and CFO toured the ORs, they had a corporate executive meeting and reported at length about how much they enjoyed the tour, according to Safstrom's supervisor who attended the meeting.
In addition to this tour, the chief information officer came for a one-hour tour and ended up staying for almost three hours. He's been back for a visit that lasted the entire day, Safstrom says. The chief operations officer also has visited. The vice president of human resources and vice president of managed care and affiliates (including home care) are being invited to tour as well.
"They're the core group, the executive council," Safstrom says. "When they vote on things, they all vote. Even though I don't have a lot to do with [the human resources and managed care administrators], it's important that they understand surgery and have a surgical focus, so when they vote, they can say `Caren showed us that.' Anytime we present a business plan, it goes to that group."
Now she receives regular e-mail messages from her CEO asking for her opinion on surgery systems he encounters. "It's as if he's looking out for us. He'll e-mail me and say, 'I don't know if surgery's interested in this, but . . . .'"
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