Not-so-great expectations
Many sterile processing departments have failures in their past that
loom large in the memories of their customers. You got 999 trays
right, but the instrument missing from last week's case was the one
that caused the blip on the OR's radar and created the Monday morn-
ing hub-bub.
You have customers who have lost faith in your ability to ever "get it
right." And yet they remain your customers. Unlike in the real world,
your perioperative team can't just walk across the street and get the
kind of quality and service they want. In a sense, your surgeons and
staff are a captive audience to your reprocessors' process improve-
ment journey — and when that process fails, they add it to the list of
reasons why "nothing will ever change."
But your reprocessors don't have to be defined by their failures.
Even though the frustrations might be from past mistakes, there is
still an opportunity for your reprocessors to chip away at the culture
of failure and set a new course for the future. Here are 3 ways they
can get started.
Own the failures up front. It can be scary to own the failures
confronting your department — especially if you don't control
all the variables (low staffing, insufficient equipment, knowledge
silos) or if the problems are rooted before your time in the depart-
ment. Either way, your CS/SPD leader should let customers know the
buck stops with him and his team. He doesn't have to make unrealis-
tic promises or throw himself under the bus for no reason, but the
first step to service recovery is demonstrating he takes responsibility
for failures. This is key to rebuilding the bridge between the OR and
SPD.
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