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began as soon as cases ended on a Friday and was completed over the weekend. We spent the following Monday recalibrating surgical equipment, performing dry runs to perfect patient flow and making sure the center was ready for its first patient, who was greeted with one of the biggest benefits of the new space: an expanded waiting room built for comfort and calm. We've doubled the seating from 35 to 70 chairs, and outfitted check-in areas with privacy screens. The additional space has created a more welcoming environment; staff constantly comment that patients are more relaxed in pre-op than they were at the former facility. The walls are painted in soothing blues and grays, and covered with photographs of the Great Smoky Mountains taken by a local photographer. People in this area have an emotional connection with the range, and patients are constantly asking about who took the pictures and which mountain peaks appear in them. That's been an unexpected benefit of connecting some element of the facili- ty's design to our local community and geographi- cal area. To create a relaxing, quiet environment, we decided against showing the news or other pro- gramming on televisions hung throughout the wait- ing room. Instead, a single large flat-screen monitor is used as a surgery tracking board. Friends or fami- ly members, when they were allowed in the waiting room before the pandemic, tracked the progress of their loved ones' cases. • Patient and staff flow. Patients leave the wait- ing room and enter a beautifully designed space with 13 pre- and 13 post-op bays lining a triangular-shaped room. We decided to separate 24 bays with curtains in order to avoid dealing with the significant and costly code requirements needed to build solid walls. Two of the post-op bays are enclosed rooms, where patients who undergo more involved procedures (such as ocular plastics) that require general anesthe- sia can recover in a more private space. The entire area is large, so patients still feel a sense of privacy behind the curtains. Plus, they often spend very little time in pre- and post-op due to the quick turnover times of eye cases and relatively fast recoveries. A large workstation divides the pre- and post-op space. Nurses have clear views of patients from the station and easily float between the areas if their help is needed. A medication administration room that sits adjacent to the workstation is where drugs are stored and eye blocks are prepared. It's a very convenient set-up. • Staff involvement. Our staff spent a significant amount of time deciding on a standardized head wall design for the pre- and post-op bays. We focused on determining the optimal locations for light switches, glove boxes, hand sanitizer dis- pensers, power outlets, vital signs monitors and hook-ups for oxygen and medical gases. We even asked our contractor to mock-up a wall design and rolled a stretcher bed against it. Nurses then ran through the motions of taking care of a patient to ensure the locations were convenient and helped them deliver efficient care. This might sound like an inconsequential detail, but easy access to hook-ups and supplies — eliminating the need to constantly walk around the patient to connect vital F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 1 • O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y . N E T • 2 1 TAKING SHAPE Building a nurses' station situated in the middle of a large triangular-shaped pre- and post-op area lets staff easily float between both sides.