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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 O N L I N E | D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5
The OR Manager's Holiday Gift List
Any of these items would look great in our ORs.
W
here did the year go? 2015
slipped away like
Surgilube off the side
of a back field when you miss the
towel, and now here we are in
making-a-list-and-checking-it-twice
season again. I've been asking my
friends in ORs everywhere for
their holiday gift lists. Ready, set ...
• Cleaner preference sheets. The first
item on the list is a better list: We wish that correct
preference sheets were the norm instead of a mira-
cle. I'm not just talking about adjusting for surgeons'
quirks and OCD here. You can ask one staffer to com-
pile all the cards uniformly or you can assign everyone to be a
specialty leader, and you'll still see glitches in your preference sheets,
like a large Richardson retractor listed for a lap chole.
• Doc of the Month. We wish our surgery departments would start giv-
ing out "Doctor of the Month" awards. They could put up a photo dis-
play, reserve a parking space, the whole bit, for whoever treats their
OR staff with the most respect and starts the most cases on time. At
the very least, this could encourage good behavior.
• A new leader in SPD. When you pull a tray that has instruments miss-
ing from it, it makes you wonder who's minding the store in sterile
processing. I'd hire scrub techs and RNs to run that department. This
dynamic duo would be sure to deliver every set perfectly, or else
they'd be called onto the OR carpet. Then maybe we could reassign
the reprocessing techs, who are used to heavy lifting, to transport and
B E H I N D C L O S E D D O O R S
Paula Watkins, RN, CNOR
