Who Is The Main Customer of Your Surgical Suite?
To best align management goals with institutional objectives the OR director needs to identify the primary customer of the surgical suite. An OR can be completely balanced or it can be biased to one or more its constituents. The main people to consider are surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, the hospital (upper management), and of course the patient.
A first step is to determine whose preferences or workload dominates the surgical suite. If surgeons are in large demand with small supply, then that may outweigh other interests. For example, a private facility may have surgeons who can pull their patients to another hospital if made to wait. As another example, in a private surgeon-owned surgery center, management may be directed as maintaining a particular partner's workload and the incentives are to schedule his/her cases with priority.
The same supply/demand balance applies to anesthesia. The situation may exist where a specific surgery group will only work with its contracted anesthesia group. In this case, a manager may have to wait until the contracted anesthesiologist is ready for the case, even if this means idle OR time. This can be avoided in institutions where one group has exclusive rights and controls anesthesia privilege over all the ORs. This arrangement is seen commonly because it eliminates factions and streamlines anesthesia placement for cases, either elective or emergency.
Hospital (Upper Management) run ORs are identified by those facilities where the hospital executives acting as agents for government authorities determine staffing and workload. Examples include hospitals in public health care systems like in European countries or the VA United States Department of Veteran Affairs in the USA.
In other surgical suites, in contrast, management decisions have patients as the first priority. Facilities performing elective cosmetic procedures for cash reimbursement are an example. Due to the patient being able to choose where they have plastic surgery, patients expect special circumstances such as first-rate customer service. Additionally, if a patient is one hour late for surgery the patient will most likely still be undergo surgery. This concept is in contrast to a large academic hospital, for example, where a patient who misses their check-in window for elective surgery is often removed from the surgery schedule to make room for re-shuffled elective and emergency cases.
Read more about this topic: Operating Room Management
Famous quotes containing the words main, customer and/or surgical:
“Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother.
That’s the main thing.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The elements of success in this business do not differ from the elements of success in any other. Competition is keen and bitter. Advertising is as large an element as in any other business, and since the usual avenues of successful exploitation are closed to the profession, the adage that the best advertisement is a pleased customer is doubly true for this business.”
—Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 5 (1919)
“With all the surgical skill and the vital rays lavished on him he should talk like a—like a congressman at a filibuster.”
—Kenneth Langtry. Herbert L. Strock. Prof. Frankenstein (Whit Bissell)