Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Subscribers

OR Excellence Award Winners - September 2017 - 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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• Adopting flex hours. Nurses used to work 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., regardless of the sur- gery schedule, and any time worked beyond those hours resulted in overtime pay. The ASC has since adopted flex hours, where nurses can expect to start the workday within a "floating" window of time — say, between 7 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. — to accommodate the schedule. The proposed schedule gets posted a week in advance, and final start times for a certain day are distributed to staff members via group text the night before. Initially, some of the longer-tenured nurses disliked not having a set schedule, so the surgery center had to contend with some turnover. But Ms. Miller says the "flex and float" policy has since become indis- pensable. Ms. Miller estimates the new policy saved the practice "thousands and thousands of dollars" on staffing resources within the first 18 months of implementation. The change has spawned other benefits, including the opportunity to cross-train pre- and post-op nurses, which, in turn, has created more flexibility in scheduling. It also compelled nurses to become more involved in other areas of the practice, such as infection control and supply chain management. 6 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 • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 7 • STRONG STAFF A "flex and float" policy for staff nurses spawned a number of bene- fits, including decreased staffing costs. The Surgery Center

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