Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Subscribers

Compounding Disaster - July 2016 - 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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Do You Get an A+ in Competency Testing? 5 tips to do a better job grading your staff's surgical know-how. C ompetencies are the professional attributes that make members of your staff good at what they do — the deft touch that guar- antees first-stick success when starting IVs, for exam- ple, or knowing precisely how to position patients. But my sense is that most administrators can do a better job of testing staff competencies. Here are 5 tips to follow. Test and retest competencies. Competencies blend knowledge, attitudes and judgment. They're groups of skills and behaviors that are identified as performance standards for a particular job. The skills and understanding needed to become competent at a job devel- op over time. A knowledge base is needed, but so is experience in the clinical care environment, because there are limits to what one can learn in the classroom. As a general rule, it takes 2 to 3 years of experience in the same job to function at a competent level. That's why you need to constantly assess the growth of each staff member by testing and retesting competencies in all aspects of her assigned roles, including, among other job-specific focuses, immediate-use sterilization, environmental cleaning, malignant hyperthermia response, universal precautions, patient positioning, IV starts and instrument sterilization. 1 2 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 U l y 2 0 1 6 Staffing Ann Geier, MS, RN, CNOR, CASC • PROVING GROUNDS Observe staff competencies real-time in actual clinical settings.

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