Outpatient Surgery Magazine

2018 Salary Survey - January 2019 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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instead of waiting for guidance to come from the top. After all, we were the ones in the trenches dealing with the patients. We felt we should be the ones looking more closely at the situation and finding ways to implement better practices. Of course, we knew we'd eventu- ally have to get buy-in from physicians and from administration, but our nursing shared governance council got the initiative off the ground, and now, almost 2 years later, we've seen dramatic results. In the first 4 months of 2017, before we implemented our new proce- dures, we had 9 documented or related pressure injuries. In the first 4 months after implementation, we had 2. We're still collecting data, but in the first 6 months of 2018, we had just 1. 2-inch mattresses too thin One of the first lights to go on was the realization that this was a pre- operative issue, not just an operating room issue. The pre-op nurses had an important role to play, as did the PACU nurses. Our wound-osto- my-continence (WOC) nurses also helped in several ways, as they tend to be well-versed in this issue. Their first contribution was to help us identify the best evidence-based practices. In fact, the WOC nurses had recently returned from a conference with some important resources. As a result, the first thing we identi- fied was that the 2-inch-thick mattresses in our ORs were too thin. The recommendation they came back with was that table mattresses be at least 3-inches thick. We'd never thought about that, and proba- bly never would have, but it made sense once it was said out loud. The revelation also underscored one of the challenges we'd face. We were going to have to justify spending some money. More on that later, but it was unrealistic to think we could immediately buy 35 new mattresses (for our 35 ORs). So, instead, we immediately brought in thicker mattresses where they were most needed. For example, some 5 2 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9

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