Staffing: Thinking Outside the Blocks

It's easy to get complacent in the way you run your facility, especially when familiar and effective workplace routines make it easy to fall into the trap of thinking "our way is the only way." If you're not regularly seeking a broad range of perspectives on approaches to patient care and staff education, training and compliance, your efforts are bound to get stale over time.

That's why I'm involved in the Bay Area Perioperative Educators (BAPE), an informal professional networking group for perioperative nurse educators in the San Francisco area that has been meeting at least quarterly since 1984. The group consists of educators from surgery centers and hospitals, and community college instructors of surgical tech and perioperative nursing programs. We spread new ideas and provide rapid responses to questions about standards in practice. The group has proven to be an invaluable asset. Here's how to create a networking group of your own so you can realize the same benefits.

1 Follow the same format

Hold meetings on a quarterly basis at the facilities of members who volunteer to host the group. Before each gathering, finalize a date on which the maximum number of members can attend and send out detailed agendas in advance.

Keep a consistent structure to the meetings. After introductions, ask each attendee to present their facility's current projects, policy changes, and any staffing and education changes or needs they have. Then discuss as a group the latest accreditation survey requirements and relevant changes to AORN Guidelines as well as pressing issues to policies, procedures or regulations that members want to address. End every session by determining when the next meeting will take place and who will host it.

2 Keep it informal

Keep the atmosphere fun and relaxed. For these types of meetings to work, the group has to want to get together on a regular basis. For many of our members, the greatest benefit of the group is the comradery we've developed. As perioperative leaders and educators, we speak our own language. Meeting as a group gives us a chance to share ideas and voice frustrations to peers who understand the pressures of working in surgery. It affords everybody an opportunity to talk openly about those pressures and come up with solutions to common challenges.

3 Head home with actionable advice

Your group should provide its members with actionable information and solutions to real world problems. For instance, at one meeting we discovered every educator had been using a surgical fire risk assessment that wasn't validated and didn't account for a number of factors that could contribute to a fire. Based on this discovery, the group put together an interdisciplinary team to develop an assessment tool that met all AORN recommendations. During a recent meeting, the group also tackled how to best fill the downtime of surgical staffs who weren't working during the stoppage of elective surgeries and how we could cross-train outpatient OR staff to take on assistant or critical-care roles.

Keep the atmosphere fun and relaxed.

4 Fill the right roles

You need a point person with exceptional organizational skills to make sure the group remains actively involved and each meeting runs smoothly. Members come and go over the years and maintaining accurate membership information is a constant challenge. Also assign a timekeeper at the meetings to ensure every member gets a fair amount of time to present as well as a person to take and maintain the minutes, which they should distribute to all attendees after the meeting. If possible, develop a dedicated website to share documents and tools among members. Finally, extend invitations to educators and leaders from a variety of organizations and facilities. Professionals from standalone ASCs, HOPDs and large medical centers bring different and valuable viewpoints to the group.

5 Go virtual

These challenging times have created unique opportunities for our group, and as educators we are skilled at adapting to change. Along with our staff, we have now moved to virtual meetings to comply with social distancing protocols. These meetings ensure that our group remains sustainable and active, which is especially important right now. This use of technology will ensure a long future for our group, regardless of what this pandemic brings. OSM