Rebecca Craig, RN, CASC

Member Focus

Rebecca Craig, RN, CASC

CEO
Harmony Surgery Center

Fort Collins, Colorado

Headshot of Rebecca Craig

Do you offer incentives to RNs who work longer days, more than 9-10 hours?

At Harmony Surgery Center, we do not offer incentives per se for working more than 9-10 hours. However, our quarterly bonus incentive program is based on hours worked not on an employee’s full-time equivalent, so it does financially behoove an employee to work additional hours. When we hire employees, we explain that our schedules might necessitate the need to stay over the typical eight-hour shift as schedules can run long/over. Our team understands that is the nature of perioperative services, and we need to stay and take care of patients as needed. In the OR, our clinical coordinator rotates a “could stay late” shift for employees so they can plan accordingly if they needed to stay later. The need to stay over an employee’s shift or more than 9-10 hours does not occur frequently so staff have been wonderful and willing to be flexible and stay longer when needed.

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With summer around the corner, how do you handle overlapping time-off requests?

Overlapping vacation requests are a challenge but we try very hard to approve and cover vacation requests and encourage work-life balance, which makes Harmony Surgery Center a great place to work. We want to keep our staff happy and try to accommodate time-off requests however, in the end, business needs must be met. We keep track of staff time off year-to-year and rotate vacation time to ensure we spread the love and time as equally as possible for holidays and summers. This gives everyone an opportunity to enjoy their desired time off. As an example, in our preop/postop and PACU areas we can only allow 2.0 FTEs off on any given day. Thankfully, we have a healthy sized pool of relief nurses which helps with coverage. Vacation requests must be submitted at least 60 days prior to the date requested. If the vacation request is denied, usually FTE’d staff can ask one of our relief or PRN nurses to pick up their shifts. OR staff is a little tighter, but our managers do a phenomenal job to accommodate most vacation requests. Ninety percent of the time staff can obtain the time off they request.