Member Focus

Title: ASC Clinical Director
Facility Name: Missoula Bone & Joint Surgery Center LLC
City: Missoula
State: Montana
Length of time your facility has been an ASCA member: Five or more years

How do you prep your staff for a survey?

Our leadership structure, teamwork, and quality/risk management program consistently keeps us prepared for unannounced surveys. Our ASC leadership team, which includes the surgical technologist/sterile processing supervisor, the OR supervisor, the preop/PACU supervisor, the pre-admission/extended recovery supervisor and the ASC clinical director, meets weekly to check in, collaborate and discuss any issues in our respective areas. Patient safety and clinical excellence are at the core of our discussions. These weekly check-ins keep us survey ready in addition to our quarterly quality/risk management meetings that this same team participates in to review all metrics that we consistently track and look for ways to continually improve. In addition, we meet as a team to specifically review previous survey requests, and to determine where to find answers in the event a surprise survey happens when any one of us are on vacation or are absent.

What is your postop phone call policy? Do you keep a log of the number of times you call if unable to reach a patient?

Our ASC procedure for patient follow-up does include RNs phone calling every patient we see. We have a list of questions we ask the patients pertaining to pain control, nausea, bleeding, swelling, voiding, bowel function, drains, fever, DME equipment, nerve blocks, follow-up appointments, etc., so that we can answer all patient questions and make appropriate referrals. We document these follow-up phone calls and include if we leave messages. We attempt to reach patients two times post-operative to ensure they have adequate discharge instructions and no questions for us until their follow-up visits with our providers.