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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1 2 • O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 0 I t's easy to get complacent in the way you run your facility, especially when familiar and effective workplace rou- tines make it easy to fall into the trap of thinking "our way is the only way." If you're not regularly seeking a broad range of perspectives on approaches to patient care and staff education, training and com- pliance, your efforts are bound to get stale over time. That's why I'm involved in the Bay Area Perioperative Educators (BAPE), an infor- mal professional networking group for peri- operative nurse educators in the San Francisco area that has been meeting at least quarterly since 1984. The group consists of educators from surgery centers and hospitals, and community college instructors of surgical tech and perioperative nursing programs. We spread new ideas and provide rapid responses to questions about standards in practice. The group has proven to be an invaluable asset. Here's how to create a networking group of your own so you can realize the same benefits. Follow the same format Hold meetings on a quarterly basis at the facilities of members who volunteer to host the group. Before each gathering, finalize a date on which the maximum number of members can attend and send out detailed agendas in advance. Keep a consistent structure to the meetings. After introductions, ask each attendee to present their facility's current projects, policy changes, and any staffing and education changes or needs they have. Then discuss as a group the latest accredita- tion survey requirements and relevant changes to AORN Guidelines as well as pressing issues to policies, procedures or regulations that members want to address. End every session by determining when the next meeting will take place and who will host it. Keep it informal Keep the atmosphere fun and relaxed. For these types of meetings to work, the group has to want to get together on a regular basis. For many of our members, the greatest benefit of the group is the comradery we've developed. As periopera- tive leaders and educators, we speak our own lan- guage. Meeting as a group gives us a chance to share ideas and voice frustrations to peers who understand the pressures of working in surgery. It affords everybody an opportunity to talk openly about those pressures and come up with solutions to common challenges. Head home with actionable advice Your group should provide its members with actionable information and solutions to real world problems. For instance, at one meeting we discov- ered every educator had been using a surgical fire risk assessment that wasn't validated and didn't account for a number of factors that could con- tribute to a fire. Based on this discovery, the group put together an interdisciplinary team to develop an assessment tool that met all AORN recommenda- tions. During a recent meeting, the group also tack- led how to best fill the downtime of surgical staffs who weren't working during the stoppage of elective 1 2 3 Thinking Outside the Blocks Look beyond your walls for fresh ideas about staff education. Staffing Anjal Pong, RN, NPD-BC, MSN, CNOR GROUP MENTALITY Members of the Bay Area Perioperative Educators meet up at the 2019 AORN Expo in Nashville, Tenn. Bay Area Perioperative Educators