1. Tie bonuses to specific thresholds. According to Sarah Martin, regional vice president of operations for Meridian Surgical Partners, good incentive programs are tied to financial and quality aspects of the ASC’s business. “For example, all staff can assist the facility to meet supply and salary goals for the month, based on flexing their hours worked and not opening unnecessary supplies, as well as helping to identify other sources for supplies,” she says. She says the key is to base the bonus on “meeting or exceeding expectations,” rather than letting the bonus become an expectation among employees regardless of effort.
2. Take in-service days for staff education. Efficiency in your ASC cannot be accomplished without a commitment to staff education, says Nicola Hawkinson, MA, NP, CEO and Founder of SpineSearch. Nurses, scrub techs and other staff members may not be familiar with complexity of spine patients, procedures and equipment. Before integrating spine surgery into your ASC, the staff requires a significant amount of education. Frequent in-services performed on a regular basis allow staff to remain up to date about new technology and surgical approaches. A well informed staff will quickly become an efficient staff.
3. Make your staff members supply experts. Tammy Burnett, administrator of The Plastic Surgical Center in Flowood, Miss., says her center keeps supply costs down by incentivizing staff members with a shared year-end bonus. Every staff member, regardless of stature or tenure, shares equally in a bonus based on the center’s year-end profit, meaning that staff members can enjoy the financial results of their hard work. To make sure her staff can make smart decisions about supply purchasing, Ms. Burnett holds regular contests where staff members have to guess how much a supply is worth. Whoever gets the closest wins a prize, and eventually the staff members learn which supplies are good values.
An in-depth knowledge of supplies benefits Cypress Surgery Center when staff members have to make decisions about purchasing. “They’re not going to skimp on quality, but they’re not going to let the rep du jour feed them supplies [we don’t need],” Ms. Burnett says.
4. Make sure staff size fits your center’s needs. It is critical for an ASC to maintain the correct number of staff to meet its case volume and mix. The best way to do this is to benchmark against other comparable centers and make sure staff levels are monitored often. “It’s more important to know how many nurses you’re using than what you’re paying them,” says Ross Alexander, MBA, the administrator of The Surgery Center of Fort Collins (Colo.). “Most surgery centers pay market rates; it’s knowing how many nurses you need to provide care efficiently and safely.”
5. Track employee satisfaction. Another key to continuing success at newer surgery centers is ensuring the staff members it hires are in it for the long run, as high staff turnover eventually leads to decreased quality care and decreased profits. Angie Laux, administrator of Bellin Orthopedic Surgery Center in Green Bay, Wis. routinely measures employee satisfaction to make sure the entire staff is happy working there and that they are invested in the mission of the facility.
“As soon as I started working here, I decided I would do employee satisfaction surveys with employees every six months and track certain metrics on a scale of one to five,” she says. “I track things like how happy employees are with their work hours, their benefit packages, whether they feel they’re being treated with respect and courtesy and how they feel about the overall teamwork of the OR team.”
Administering employee satisfaction surveys also gives Ms. Laux a better idea of what employees are unhappy with so that proper changes can take place, such as employee vacation time which Ms. Laux says many employees expressed concern over.
“A lot of them might have had as much as 4-5 weeks of vacation time at their old workplace, so they were worried about that,” she says. “I did a market analysis of what other organizations were offering their employees, compared that to what a new employee gets here, and took the data to our governing board. They agreed we needed to increase our vacation time, so now our employees have 22 days of vacation time instead of 17 days.”
