O' Come, All Ye Consultants: When to Make the Call for CS/SPD Support

If you've ever felt like the four walls of your CS department were about to metaphorically come crashing down on top of you, this post is for you.

If you have ever brought up a serious safety concern to your C-suite leaders, but gotten brushed aside because of other, "more important" matters, I urge you to read on.

If you have ever tinged with fear, embarrassment, or dismay when you've heard "they" were bringing in "consultants," hopefully you will walk away from this with a new perspective.

Now let's get to it. Here are five examples of when it's time for your CS/SPD team to call in the big guns:

1) Lots of Indians, No Chief: Life sans Leader

If you have a large, complex CS department with an open Manager/Director role, that may mean you need to make the call for temporary reinforcements. Besides point #2 below, this is one of the most obvious reasons to reach outside your facility for serious CS assistance. The last thing a department needs is an extended period of time with either A) no leadership at all, or B) leadership with little to no expertise in CS. Although Rome wasn't built in a day, it was burned in a day. (Well, technically it was six days, but who's counting?) Don't let life without a leader sink your sterile processing ship. If you find yourself without a chief, it may be time to go off the reservation and contact a reputable CS leadership consulting agency to help plug the gap until you can replace the slot with a permanent leader.

2) Life on the Edge: From Almost to Always

If you find yourself in a situation where your team is caught in a downward quality spiral that has your instruments always on the edge of a serious safety event, don't mess around, phone a friend and bring in some consulting firepower. I'll discuss my overall philosophy of CS consultants at the end of this post, but for now, just know that consulting engagements are a fantastic way to leverage attention, support, and $$$ for your immediate CS needs. If facilities go for the upfront investment to to bring these folks in, they automatically have a vested interest in giving their findings a real hearing. If you can muster the courage to make this call earlier rather than later, it can mean the difference between a quality turnaround story or one of those headlines you don't want to have on the evening news. Don't let your almost turn into always.

3) Where to Park and How to Process: Equipment Placement 101

Whether you're building a new CS department, renovating your current one, or just trying to find a way to work some miracles in your present space, equipment planning is another great reason to get some extra design experience at your service. Current workflow issues are somewhat easy to identify because they hit you in the face every morning when you walk into a mountain of unprocessed inventory, but future bottlenecks and process gaps can be difficult to foresee without the expertise that a CS consultant can bring to the table. These teams often have fancy design software that can let you see a 3-D layout of your proposed workflow and even do volume calculations on your new equipment's efficiency and timings. Unless you're a CS renaissance man (or woman), these aren't things you really want to give an old college try. If you've ever had to work in a poorly designed CS department, you know these equipment planning decisions touch everything from productivity to employee morale. Make it count and make the call.

4) Molehills into Mountains: Making CS Integration Great Again

As health systems continue to grow (or perish), the likelihood that your CS department will be talking of "integration" in some form or fashion is growing by the day. Centralized departments are being identified as possible hubs for processing instrumentation for multiple smaller/outlying facilities -- to lower costs, increase efficiencies, and enable stricter oversight regarding quality assurance standards. If this directive has been given to your team or is being batted around in your executive committees, it may be worth your time to bring in a team of CS consultants who have experience with other facilities who have done this successfully. Like equipment planning, large scale integrations of multiple CS departments isn't something with which you want to try and reinvent the wheel. Done correctly, these relationships can help uncover serious logistical and budgetary issues before they bury your team in a heap of integrated rubble.

5) Prepare Ye the Way of the Surveyors: There's an Audit for That

And finally, one of the most common uses of CS consultants these days is for some variation of AAMI, TJC, or other regulatory audit to prepare our departments for the coming of the clip-boarded, detail-oriented, semi-regular accreditation granting teams of surveyors ready to give us a veritable pollice verso. If you haven't had a vendor offer their version of these mini-consults to you yet, just wait - your time is coming. And if you are at all anxious about what the real surveyors will find when they breeze through your shop, it may behoove you to bring these teams in as a set of fresh eyes to comb through your current processes for potential accreditation "opportunities for improvement." As I've argued before, I think you should be shooting higher than just passing these surveys, but if even that seems like a stretch, there are great CS consultants out there who specialize in prepping you for the big day (or week) of your survey. If you send up the bat-signal, they will come a'running.

--------------

Okay, before you go, I want to say a few more quick things about these mysterious consultants that we speak of, and lay out a brief Summa Consultantia of sorts. I will heartily grant you that not all CS consultants are created equal. Not all who come bearing services have the knowledge to back it up. Nor are they the silver-bullet for every problem that comes around the bend in the Sterile Processing universe. However, as a general rule, our perspective as CS industry leaders should be one of openness and engagement with these teams.

As a general rule, our perspective as CS industry leaders should be one of openness and engagement with these consulting teams.

A great many of them were once "one of us," laboring side by side in overheated decontam areas or struggling to make use of every square inch of storage space in cramped hospital basements. Even those without direct CS experience often come with decades of OR background and industry involvement with the very agencies to which we are held accountable. While never an end in and of themselves, successful CS consults can become watershed moments in the life-cycles of our departments -- leading to new equipment, streamlined workflows, successful surveys, and more. The presence of CS consultants in our facilities, at particular times and in particular ways, should not be something we flee, but something we see as welcomed company in the pursuit of excellent patient care.

After all, we're in this thing together!

W. Hank Balch ? December 2016

This article is the sole opinion of the author and in no way reflects the position of any employer or facility. You can find over 65 other Sterile Processing articles and commentary here.