Member Focus

Title: Director of Clinical Operations
Facility Name: Johns Hopkins Surgery Center Series
City: Baltimore
State: Maryland
Length of time your facility has been an ASCA member: One year

How do you perform disaster drills during work time and make them pertinent?

We schedule quarterly drills at different times of the day so we can ensure all staff receive training. Also, because a disaster occurring as everyone is just arriving to work could be quite different from one that might occur in the middle of the day or after most of the staff have gone for the day. In addition, we create different scenarios so that staff can walk through the appropriate responses for each case scenario. We make sure that staff act as active participants in the drills versus simply acting as observers so that everyone is familiar with the various roles they could play during a disaster.

How long before their procedure do you ask patients to arrive? How do you reduce wait times?

We ask our patients who are receiving regional blocks to arrive one-and-a-half hours before their scheduled procedure. All others arrive one hour before.

We reduce wait times by accurately scheduling cases. This means we look at our surgeon average procedure times based on the type of procedure. We also ensure that we add in time for room preparation and turnover. This helps us to avoid having patients arrive too early or too late. If there are delays during the day, when possible, we try to contact patients to arrive at a later time.