map out the process to look for repetitive or unnecessary steps — and
identify ways to make it more effective and efficient," says Ms. Riley.
For example, Ms. Riley's consultant suggested that members of the
OR team should roll individual carts full of soiled instruments to the
sterile processing department as soon as they're ready instead of wait-
ing to move several at a time. Doing so prevents a bottleneck of carts
in sterile processing that makes it difficult for reprocessing techs to
keep pace with arriving instruments.
Ms. Riley says her consulting team assigned designated runners to
move about the sterile processing department, a role that let repro-
cessing techs remain active at decontamination workstations. "One
person is feeding the others work based on need," says Ms. Riley.
"That was a brilliant suggestion."
The team of consultants also helped her organized storage racks —
reworking shelving configurations and adjusting shelf heights based
on the size of instrument pans — in order to eliminate wasted space
and maximize capacity.
During his consulting days, Mr. Norton made sure sterile processing
teams were comprised of interchangeable parts — skilled profession-
als who mastered every aspect of instrument care.
He also used to marvel at the number of facilities who treated
instrument reprocessing as an art instead of a science. "Very few
department leaders established a standardized work process and
required their teams to follow it," he says.
Standardization is one of the biggest lessons Ms. Riley learned from
her consultants. "We made sure everyone, no matter the time of day
or volume of work, approached tasks the same way every time," she
explains.
Mr. Norton instructed facility leaders to record how long it took
instruments to go through the entire sterilization circuit, from ORs
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