Member Focus - ASC Focus Magazine

Focus on Members

Member Focus

Member Focus invites ASCA members to express their views on key ASC issues. Share your perspective with your colleagues and get to know your peers in the ASC community.

Want to be the next featured member?

Answer one or both of the following questions:

Given COVID-19, does staff need to be retrained on infection control policies, specifically proper donning and doffing of PPE, hand hygiene and environmental cleaning?
How are you keeping in touch with your staff/furloughed staff? Is it through Zoom or any other mechanism?

Questions? Write Sahely Mukerji.

Joleen Harrison

Title: Administrator
Facility Name: Mankato Surgery Center
City: Mankato
State: Minnesota
How long has your facility been an ASCA member? Five or more years

Certain ASCs are sewing masks to help their healthcare community fight the dearth of PPE in the current COVID-19 pandemic. Is your ASC doing anything special to help your community combat the crisis?

We did slow down to doing "essential" cases only, continued to screen patients and employees, and implemented CDC phases of PPE use. The slowdown gave our state time to assess the PPE needs in the state. We met with the Minnesota governor's office to review the surgery centers in Minnesota and our role for the state. We outlined information on our PPE and anesthesia machine use and were ready to help the state if needed.

I started a mask production group to help our community. We used an operating room material used for sterilzing our equipment to make the masks, and that has been sucessful. We made close to 5,000 masks and gave them to our local clinic owners, long-term care facilities and other crisis centers that had a mask shortage.

If your ASC is temporarily closed, what are you doing now to make certain you can reopen safely and quickly once the emergency declaration is lifted?

We reviewed our PPE and items on back order to make sure that these items were available in a timely manner to perform scheduled surgeries. We did not close, we were open to doing those cases deemed "essential" according to the Minnesota governor's executive order.

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