Tag: Management

Teaching hospitals are adding business managers

As financial pressures grow, ORs are adding business managers. That’s particularly true for teaching hospitals, where 64% now have a business manager, and for larger ORs with 10 or more rooms, where 55% do, according to the 22nd annual OR Manager Salary/Career Survey. In contrast, 5 years ago, just 47%…

Read More

By: OR Manager
November 13, 2012
Share

How to make 'funny' a part of your leadership role

With all that managers have to balance—schedules, meetings, staff, reports, and shrinking resources, not to mention home, family, and school—who has time to think about being funny? Humor may be more valuable than you imagine, not only in dealing with stress but also in being a better manager. Humor is…

Read More

By: OR Manager
September 1, 2012
Share

Staff satisfaction: Happy employees have a payoff

Nearly two-thirds (60%) of employees who leave a position do so because of their relationship with their direct supervisor, according to the Studer Group, a health care consulting organization. “Satisfaction is about relationship,” says Marcus Erb, senior research partner at the Great Place to Work Institute, which helps organizations become…

Read More

By: OR Manager
September 1, 2012
Share

Lateral violence: Tools managers can use to help shift the culture

An orientee comes to you in tears saying a couple of tenured nurses have snapped at her or huffed impatiently when she asked a question. Several other staff have met with you individually about conflict and hurtful comments they say are happening on one of the specialty teams. You already…

Read More

By: OR Manager
August 1, 2012
Share

How to have a Leaner OR department

There's plenty of buzz (and confusion) about "Lean health care." Many wrongly assume Lean is simply applying Toyota lean manufacturing tools to health care. Unfortunately, many approach it that way. At the University of Tennessee, we define Lean health care as "…the application of concepts, tools, and management prescriptions to…

Read More

By: Charles E. Noon, PhD
May 1, 2009
Share

Lean thinking: Lessons of Toyota to help improve surgical services

Special focus: Lean in the OR Page 11: How to have a leaner OR department Page 13: Getting staff's buy-in for Lean Page 16: The diary of one OR's kaizen event Page 18: Lean methods for weeding out waste Page 21: Using Lean to steer a department What could a…

Read More

By: OR Manager
May 1, 2009
Share

Lean methods for weeding out waste

What can a surgical services director learn about running the OR by working at a forklift factory? During 2 weeks in Japan in 2004, Sandra Saltzer, RN, MPA, had a chance to tour 3 factories and actually work in one. At the time, she was director of surgical services at…

Read More

By: OR Manager
May 1, 2009
Share

Using Lean to steer a department

When a perioperative nurse was recently promoted to be the OR's clinical coordinator, she inherited a department badly in need of coordination. The OR manager was frequently out of the department at meetings, leaving no one to coach the team. Not an experienced manager, the coordinator needed a way to…

Read More

By: Pat Patterson
May 1, 2009
Share

The diary of one OR's kaizen event

If you could huddle for 5 days with a few people who really understand your patient flow and you had the resources, what could you achieve? A team at Integris Southwest Medical Center in Oklahoma City took that approach and came up with a surprisingly simple and inexpensive tool to…

Read More

By: Pat Patterson
May 1, 2009
Share

Getting the staff's buy-in for Lean

When Pam Murphy, RN, director of surgical services at 144-bed Piedmont Newnan Hospital in Newnan, Georgia, first heard a Lean presentation, she says, "It made sense, because we are so process driven. The whole focus is, 'What is touching the patient, and what is value added?'" Piedmont Newnan's ORs were…

Read More

By: Pat Patterson
May 1, 2009
Share

Join our community

Learn More
Video Spotlight
Live chat by BoldChat