Hours of Operation

[Craig Nitschke]

Hello I am seeking information. I am thinkinfg of extending my dept hours of operation. Currently we operate 6am to 11pm. Hopwever, the Operating room in the last few months has increased cases tremendously and my evening shift is slammed on a daily basis. Of course it is difficult to get done with needed items for the next day when they come down late and there is not the time needed. I am not asking for advice on overtime...what I am seeking is on your dept hours of operation, specifically from depts that only do Sterile Processing and patient equipment NOT nursing units supplies.

Basically, DOES YOUR SPD HAVE 24 HOUR COVERAGE?

[djw]

At my facility we have some odd hours. We operate 24 hrs a day, but only 5 days per week. We have gone to a call schedule only for weekends and the 2 nights that are not covered. I am currently working the overnight shift, Sunday-Friday,10:00pm until 06:30am. We have only two fte's on the 3-11 shift. I finish up all the work that they were not able to complete, plus helping to get ready for the next day. It seems to be working fairly well, and it relieves pressure for the day and eve shift. Eves does not have to kill themselves trying to get everything through, and things are clean, organized and ready to roll each weekday morning.To clarify about call on weekends, we do come in automatically to make our rounds of other dept.'s to bring in and reprocess items.(OB, ED, Cath Lab, etc.). When that is done, we are free to leave until we are needed by the OR (or not:it has (rarely) happened that there were no cases all weekend, and we only had to take care of other departments.)

[libra]

We are a 24/7 operation. Nites take care of any leftover work or late cases. They also do the picking of the case carts for the next day. We average about 50 cases a day. Hope this helps.:)

[pixieduster]

Basically, there are only 2 of us that handle the Decontam/Sterile Processing in our hospital. Decontam hours are 8:30am-4:30pm, and Sterile hours are 9:30am-5:30pm. Our OR schedule is covered with their staff from 7:00 until
6:00pm. Monday through Friday only. With our increased case loads we are getting alot of overtime, and lately we have an Orthopedic surgeon who likes to use our OR on the weekends for non-emergencies. We do not work weekends in our department, so the mess is left for us Monday morning.
How do you work the "on call" for your department? I'm thinking of maybe suggesting it if the amount of cases we do in a week increases. Right now we average around 18 cases a day.

[djw]

On call works this way- after regular hours-if the OR uses one only items, or has a trauma, the night Charge nurse has a list of who is on call along with their pager number or home phone, and we are called just like everyone else. She calls the OR staff, anesthesia, and SPD are called. Usually just to clean trauma trays, one onlies, or if there are several surgeries. One only and trauma trays are a mandatory call-in, if they have several smaller surgeries it is left up to the OR team whether they want to call us in or not. More often than not they do-just so we do not walk into a mess on Mondays. By the way, instr. that are left for long periods of time risk damage from blood and body fluids, and even some of the soaks and sprays can do damage if left to sit on instr. and utensils too long. One of the downsides to this-we are paid on-call pay and call back if needed. Good for us, but a definite impact to the budget. That is one of the reasons we have gone to the 5 day a week 24 hour schedule. Shift differential is less than a dollar more an hour than call pay, and they do not have to pay call-back and/or overtime during the week if we were to get called in. Hope some of this info is useful to you.

[sonny1388]

PixieDuster: You are killing me, just thinking about trying to cover 18 cases a day with only two people! We average about 16 and we have 4 fte's. (We do sometimes have days where there are 2-4 total joints or PLIF's mixed in with that average).

We have hours from 530-2100, with call during closed hours. We do rounds, warm up/test flashers, steris machines, and one autoclave Sat and Sun morning. We have one pager that the person on call takes with them, and we get called in for almost any case that is done during closed hours (the only exception being colonoscopies or EGD's). We clean and sterilize the instrumentation, as well as cleaning the room and turning over the anesthesia machines during call hours.

We have toyed with the idea of going to 24hrs, and have even extended open hours to 2300, but found that our late person had a very boring job 5 out of 7 days, and adding the two extra hours did nothing to decrease OT hours. We are fortunate enough right now to have a last shift person who is flexible enough to come in early/late depending on the schedule.

[pixieduster]

sonny: It's amazing the different responsibilites we all have! My co-worker and I are able to handle the busier days because we only have our Steam Autoclaving and ETO to do. The Steris and flashers are taken care of and used only by our OR staff. We are very lucky. Reading the other messages, I'd say we are extremely lucky! Thanks for the help!

[charlotte williams]

My Sterile Processing Department operates 7 day per week
Monday-Friday 24 hour coverage
Sat.Sun.Holidays 16 hours
Monday-Friday
Day shift
5:00am-3:00pm
Flex shift
8:00AM-4:00PM
8:30AM_5:00PM
Evening Shift
3:00PM-11:00PM
Night Shift
10:30PM-7:00am
Weekends and Holidays
7:00AM-3:00PM
3:00PM-11:00PM
We provide casecart service to the Main OR Monday-Friday
Looking to increase weekend and Holiday coverage to 24 hours

[debbie]

I use to run my department 6:30am to 11:30pm
M-F 1st shift 7-3:30 and 2nd 3-11:30
Wknd/holidays 1st only 7-3:30

Last year we went from a budgeted schedule of 25 to 30 cases. 30 was a busy day until we started to hit 40 to 47 cases. At that time I started changing hours.
On a good day (no one on vacation or ill or on LOA) I now run
2 staff at 6:30 to 3 per OR request to start taking out ETO loads
2 staff at 7 to 3:30
1 staff person 8-4:30
1 staff person 9-5:30
4-2nd shift remained 3:00 to 11:30
Weekends and holidays remain
The cross over helped because they work as a team so when one area was slower they helped others catch up or get ahead.
On occassion there were things left over but nothing critical.
We have slowed down again and I let the 2 late starts come in at 7 or 8 if I don't think the cross over is needed.

It is never easy to balance since it is a feast or famine department

[doc7592]

Debbie,
Is your staff able to work both prep and decontam?
I have 3 techs in decontam staggered shifts
7 techs in prep. The late shift works from 2-10:30. I'm looking to change it to 3-11 because of overtime. For the most part they are here until 11 anyway.

[Harvey Johnson]

Our Department operates the usual sterilization duties for 7 rooms, picks supplies for case carts, rework code carts, restock room cells and pick up equipment from units on rounds twice each day...no eto :D
Cases average 34 per day.
Duty assignments are rotated at 3 to 4 hour intervals.
We open at 0600 and usually close 0100. Weekends are 0700 to 1530.
Start times:
Opening person 0600
AM person 0700
Supervisor 0700
AM person 0730
Lead Tech 0800
AM person 0830
AM person 1030
.5 FTE 1100
PM person 1400
PM person 1500
PM person 1630
This works well for us, covering the rush and allowing evening shift to finish up.

[debbie]

All my staff are cross trained so they can work in any area if the need arise's.
I try not to schedule the same person in decontam 2 days in a row due to the stress it puts on your body because we do a lot of orthopedic sets. I try to have 2 people in decontam. One to do equipment rounds and then assist the person taking apart the case carts. One will do the submerable instruments and the other will take containers apart, wipe down cords, scopes, power and such.
If it is slow in one area that person floats to help others. They are trained in case cart assemble, decontam, sterilization (assemble sets for ancillary departments, biologicals, load and unload sterilizers, code 4 carts, linen etc), OR basic instrument sets (majors, minor, plastic, ortho), Specialty instruments (power, scopes, all sets that are surgery specific Neuro, Ent, Dental etc...)
You might be surprised what a 1/2 hour does. You might want to do it on a trial basis and if it doesn't work maybe we can help think of another solution.