Our Voice of the Customer (VOC) council convened earlier this spring to discuss a topic on the minds of many sterile processing department managers, but not necessarily at the forefront of current conversations: data.

If you missed the first VOC blog post on data, Studying Your Department: Where to Start and How to Gather Data, be sure to check it out!

Once a department has established how to consistently collect reliable data, it’s time to put it to use. A great place to start is addressing workarounds that have become standardized within a department’s workflow.

Common Workarounds That Become Commonplace

Often, departments may not even realize that a workaround to a solution has become standard practice in their department. Here are some common examples of workarounds that can become permanent if not stamped out:

• Shortened soaking times – Without a timer at the sink, it can be easy for instrument soak times go too long, or not long enough, to meet IFU requirements.
• Eliminated soaking times – In some cases, especially when technicians are rushed or don’t understand the importance of soaking, they may skip soaking, thinking later cleaning will be enough.
  
• Flushing requirements not being met – IFUs that call for specific flushing requirements, such as 60 seconds, can be difficult to meet when syringe flushing, even with a timer. Because the syringe needs to be filled, attached, and emptied, ensuring flushing requirements are met can prove challenging.
• Testing – Lack of tools can sometimes lead to skipping tests, such as checking insulation. If two techs share one insulation testing machine, the one not using it may skip the test to finish their tray faster or out of impatience.their tray faster, or due to impatience.
• Visual Inspection – Limited availability or complexity of borescope systems can cause some departments to skip internal visual inspections.

The Consequences of Standardizing Shortcuts

Taking shortcuts in sterile processing leads to numerous negative consequences. For example:

• Patient safety – Failing to follow an IFU or missing a test compromises patient safety
• Damage & repair – Mishandling devices increases the likelihood of damage, leading to costly repairs and reduced availability for the OR.
• Bioburden build-up – When instruments aren’t properly reprocessed according to their IFU, bioburden and excess chemicals can build up, leading to premature wear and failure, reducing the useful life of your device inventory.
• Reputation – Shortcuts taken in SPD often affect the operating room, damaging its reputation.
• Turnover – When dedicated CS staff see their coworkers cutting corners and working with less care then they do, it can cause resentment and distrust, and ultimately the resignation of great employees. One negative employee can ruin the experience of many.

How to Use Data to Identify Challenges

Good data can turn intuition into truth, and further into action. Good data can often identify challenges in reprocessing departments, such as:

Frequency of processing

How many times per month is a tray type being processed?

Use an overbooked Inventory report and track when trays aren’t supplied to identify areas for improving inventory or processes.

Actual data from our VOC participants:

• One tray was requested 30 times in a month. The department was unable to supply it twice.
• Management escalates the issue and requests an inventory increase if 10 or more instances occur where the request couldn’t be fulfilled.

Turnaround times

How often do we receive requests to expedite trays?

Expedited trays are prone to errors, meaning that they’re a good target for quality assurance (QA) audits. Seeing high volumes of expedited requests for a specific tray type lets you know where to focus your efforts in training and materials.

Use data that demonstrates consistent quick turnaround requests for specific trays to justify expanding your inventory and better meet the OR’s needs.

Inventory without history report

What portion of our inventory is outdated and no longer in use?

Using a report to assess how often every tray type has been used can help departments streamline and optimize their inventory. A tray that has been reprocessed only once a year for the last three years is likely being reprocessed solely according to department policy.

This often happens when a physician that requested the tray leaves the hospital or begins using different or newer instruments. Data associated with inventory and tray usage can help departments justify the removal of certain trays, reducing annual workload, optimizing inventory, and freeing up space for tray types the department needs more of.

Equipment Usage

How often is my critical equipment being utilized?

During one VOC member’s example, equipment usage reports indicated only one of three functioning sterilizers was ever being used. The department’s productivity was bottle-necked to 33% total sterilizer output.

Noticing this as an artificial bottleneck, the SPD manager looked into why technicians were using only one sterilizer instead of all three. The technicians explained that this sterilizer was in an optimal position for the department’s workflow and was easiest to access and use.

After making all the tools accessible at the other two sterilizers, technicians began using them more often, which alleviated the bottleneck and improved the department’s productivity significantly.

Individual Performance

How are specific team members contributing to output?

If a technician goes from 536 trays one month, down to 330 trays the next, managers can definitively identify performance has been affected. You can identify training needs or factors affecting performance outside the workplace and discuss them.

Moving forward

Now that we’ve explored how data can help identify and solve problems, it’s time to create a meaningful scorecard. Scorecards provide consistent assessment against benchmarks, turning data from noise, into indicators of health. Be on the lookout for our next blog post: “Department scorecards and metrics: What to measure and how to build meaningful scorecards”

About: Voice of the Customer Committee

The Voice of the Customer Committee is a panel of healthcare and instrument reprocessing professionals who have graciously donated their time to share their expertise and guidance on current challenges faced by the instrument reprocessing community. Through sharing their insights, experiences, and best practices, we have been given the opportunity to share these findings with our readership. We’d like to thank our VOC members for their outstanding input and insights, as well as their time! Thank you for your continued partnership, and all you do.