Sterilization Station: A Sterile Processing Empowerment Podcast
Welcome to "Sterile Processing Empowerment Podcast, the podcast dedicated to elevating the field of sterile processing and surgical services! In an industry where precision and care intersect, we believe that knowledge is power. Our mission is to empower, encourage, and motivate every professional engaged in the transformative world of healthcare.
Join us each week as we delve into enlightening discussions that shine a light on best practices, emerging innovations, and the critical role sterile processing plays in patient safety. Whether you're a seasoned expert or just starting your journey, our panels and expert guests will provide invaluable insights through engaging conversations and real-world stories.
From the nuances of instrument handling to the latest in sterilization techniques, we cover it all. Expect thought-provoking interviews, educational segments, and motivating content designed to inspire you to elevate your craft. Together, let’s foster a community that champions excellence in surgical services and celebrates the unsung heroes of healthcare.
Tune in to where expertise meets passion, and every episode empowers you to make a difference in the operating room and beyond.
Sterilization Station: A Sterile Processing Empowerment Podcast
Skills with Jill: From Bedside to Leadership - Building a Culture of Excellence in Sterile Processing with Diana Anderson
Curiosity drives quality in sterile processing. That's the fundamental message from Diana Anderson, an 18-year healthcare veteran who transformed her career from bedside nursing to sterile processing leadership by constantly asking "why?"
Join us for this fascinating exploration of quality systems in sterile processing as Diana shares practical wisdom gained through her journey. She reveals how understanding the clinical application of instruments creates powerful learning moments: watching a rigid laparoscope connect to a camera or viewing surgical technique videos for orthopedic procedures brings clarity to the meticulous work of reprocessing. Diana's approach emphasizes consistency – standardized processes, regular auditing, and accessible documentation that shows "what good looks like."
The conversation delves into real-world challenges every sterile processing department faces: navigating complex manufacturer IFUs, building effective multidisciplinary teams, and fostering partnership with the OR. Diana's innovative solutions include leveraging SharePoint for digital standard work, utilizing electronic tracking systems to display step-by-step instructions, and facilitating cross-training between departments. She emphasizes the value of bringing frontline technicians into improvement discussions since they encounter the daily realities of implementation.
What emerges is a philosophy that balances regulatory compliance with practical application. "If it's hard, it's challenging, it's probably the right work," Diana observes, especially when patient safety hangs in the balance. Whether you're new to sterile processing or a seasoned veteran, this episode offers valuable strategies for elevating quality in your daily operations through curiosity, standardization, and collaborative partnership. Connect with Diana on LinkedIn to continue the conversation about building excellence in sterile processing.
Welcome to the Skills with Jill mini-series, a series that will explore various skills through sterile processing, quality accreditation and endoscopes. I appreciate Bill and Sterilization Station for allowing me to bring this series to you. Check out all the great things arriving daily from Sterilization Station. Today we have Diana Anderson. She is a dedicated mom of three with 18 years of experience in healthcare. That includes 11 years specializing in sterile processing, starting as a technician and moving into leadership. She has a passion for upholding high standards for patient safety through quality, regulatory compliance and operational readiness. Currently, diane is the sterile processing supervisor at a large hospital in a metropolitan area where she focuses on being a sterile processing OR liaison for orientation, competency and standardization. Her role also provides oversight of instrument repairs and vetting of specialty instrumentation. Thanks for joining me today.
Speaker 2:How are you, Hi Jill? Thanks for having me. I'm doing great.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to talk to you and tell your story about all the great things that you've done. So let's kick it off. How did you build your quality skill set in sterile processing?
Speaker 2:I think that the biggest thing for me was just curiosity. I was always curious to know the why behind everything that we do in the sterile processing department. Why do we do things a particular way? Keeping the big picture in mind? Knowing how SPD a lot of outlying make to our process in sterile processing, how that could possibly affect everyone down the line? Keeping the big picture in mind again.
Speaker 1:I think that's such a great point to bring home how our roles can sometimes affect all of those areas, and I think that I know that you've maybe worked on the floors before and so do you think that that kind of gives you an aspect as well to bring it back and remember those departments?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely A hundred percent. I remember when I first got started in sterile processing I didn't even know that that little department existed At that time it was in a very small regional hospital. I never really thought how surgical instrumentation got cleaned or sterilized. The thought never crossed my mind. So when I came into that realm it was a big learning curve for me. But having that experience at the bedside, up on the floors, floating to the different departments, really, really ties it all together as to how important what we do. It affects everyone else.
Speaker 1:Exactly when you think back to those early days. Do you have any little like one things where you can remember, like that light bulb moment of like oh, this is why we do that or this is how we do that, and that makes total sense for what I've been confused about. I?
Speaker 2:think that learning how the instrumentation is actually used really drove it home for me. I remember something as simple as learning how a rigid laparoscope attaches to a camera and the coupler why the coupler? You can squeeze it and you insert the scope. Having those little aha moments like, oh, that's how that's used. Looking at some of the surgical technique videos for our larger orthopedic systems total knees, total hips just watching the instructional videos on the manufacturer websites and learning how that instrumentation actually goes together and how it's applied in the OR those were really big light bulb moments for me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for sharing that. I think those are really key things and how we can think about sometimes it's really overwhelming and what you can maybe do as a couple key points. All right, I'll move on to the next one, Thinking about quality process. What do you think makes the most impact on the day-to-day work?
Speaker 2:I think having a lot of consistency in your processes. Consistency in auditing is really important To have the same standards, the same standards of work. Having all of your employees educated in those standards of work is important and makes a big impact on our department.
Speaker 1:How do you train the trainer on like the SLPs, or do your other supervisors kind of do that rounding like you're talking about?
Speaker 2:Yep, A lot of our shift supervisors do a lot of that, and then a lot of it falls to our preceptors too. They play a critical, critical role in keeping everybody up to date. We utilize our safety huddles to disseminate new standards of work. Review standards of work yeah, just being survey ready every day. That helps us to be survey ready every day, especially that auditing piece.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a great point to be survey ready every day. That helps us to be survey ready every day, especially that auditing piece. Yeah, I think that's a great point to be survey ready every day. And how do we put that into our work where we can check that? What's one of your biggest successes and what steps or tools did you use to reach it?
Speaker 2:One thing that I focused a lot on was developing standard of work for a lot of our processes in sterile processing department, getting those all updated on new standard of work for a lot of our processes in the sterile processing department, getting those all updated on new standard of work forms and then uploading those to a SharePoint site so that all of our staff could have access to those at work.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic that they're not in paper form and they're just easy accessible on all the computers.
Speaker 2:And that made it a lot easier to keep everything updated as well. Of course, we have a few of our very, very important ones, or standards of work that aren't really used too frequently, like saying we have a utility interruption or something like that. That, knock on wood, doesn't happen very frequently, yeah, but having those in paper form as well and readily available, that's something that we've started doing recently Awesome.
Speaker 1:What tools do you find for those standard work? I know you said SharePoint, but are there like, do you take the IFUs, like what kind of things? As you're building that standard of work? Do you put pictures in there Just trying to help kind of our audience understand they're very detailed, whereas your policies.
Speaker 2:procedures are a little more high level. This gets into more of the nitty gritty step and also pointing out what good looks like. So giving picture examples of what good looks like, writing a standard work of how to document something in our electronic tracking system, taking snippets of the screen and putting it into that standard of work so people can actually follow along with the pictures as well.
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah, that's great Having the words and the pictures there like what goods looks like. I really like that. How do you navigate the manufacturer IFUs that have steps we can't complete in the real world of sterile processing departments that?
Speaker 2:is a really great question and it does come up fairly frequently. I use all of my resources, I'm not afraid, to reach out to the manufacturer, partner with them, partner with an interdisciplinary team including infection prevention, risk upper leadership of our department, so everybody's on the same page. If need be, do risk assessments. But I think the biggest thing is to work with your vendors, develop that relationship with your vendors and your vendor reps, because a lot of times I find that they don't understand how our department works and how we're really grounded in those IFUs.
Speaker 1:Almost like teaching them Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yep, I don't really know how to say it. Nothing against, but they don't see our side of it, like the behind the scenes of it a lot of times. Right, and just helping to educate them as to why some of the requirements in the IFUs are extremely challenging for us to achieve and, more importantly, to achieve on a consistent basis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like in that real world, like we're talking about right, Like helping them understand. Here's what I have to do, whether it's maybe the five minutes of each step or breaking it down for them, like you were saying. I really like that, Yep.
Speaker 2:And then, like I said before, including your interdisciplinary team, including IP, get your crosscks and just make sure that everybody is on the same page and grounded in how you proceed so you can speak to your process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, being able to speak to the process. I really like that when you talk about that survey readiness, so that you can show here's what we did to get to the point that we're at in our standard work lot of steps, especially in decontam, utilizing your electronic tracking system.
Speaker 2:If it has a workflow module, build those workflows, Copy and paste your IFU into those workflows so when your staff has that tray at the sink those steps automatically pop up for them. That has helped our staff a lot with complex instruments that require multiple steps for cleaning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is a great point. I appreciate that you pointed that out, because some of those tracking systems may or may not have that, or maybe you didn't know that that was a feature. So using all of those features to take full advantage. This, actually talking about your multidisciplinary, brings us into the next question From your perspective, what does the multidisciplinary approach to quality and sterile processing look like? I know we touched a little bit on who would be there, but maybe we can go into a little bit more detail.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Bring all the stakeholders to the table. Don't be afraid to reach out. Include everybody. They're going to appreciate being in the loop and being included and a lot of times they actually enjoy the learning process behind it.
Speaker 1:Be open to change, welcome process improvement and really engage your frontline staff Some of these multidisciplinary meetings as frontline staff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I want to make sure that a process that we develop is attainable in the real world in the department. Yeah, yeah, I like that. They're the ones that are closest to the work. The technicians in the department. They're doing the work day in and day out. They know the hiccups that unexpectedly pop up. Yeah, they're really going to be key to have them involved?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and can we just talk one more time? Who do you find most value as part of bringing into that multidisciplinary, or do you find that it changes Like sometimes, depending on what it may be, you'll bring in a different department.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it totally varies depending on what process you're looking at. If you're looking at a new process involving consumable supplies, you're definitely going to want to have your supply chain or materials management team at the table to make sure that maybe the process before it gets to SPD is attainable for them. They might also bring to light other issues that I might not see because I don't work in their department.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And do you usually have IP risk as part of your kind of main core? That usually would be the multidisciplinary team base and then you would bring in others. I think I usually start with infection prevention. I work very closely with them. Yeah, we're kind of the cornerstone of them, right.
Speaker 2:Yes, I am not afraid to reach out to my infection preventionists to get a cross-check, to just run something by them see if they have any concerns Exactly so that also bringing it, looping it all back into survey readiness, your infection preventionist is going to be right there along with you for surveys, so they also are grounded and can speak to the process too, from their vantage point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. What are some of the ways you have found to work well to partner for OR engagement to support sterile processing processes that need both areas, such as point of use, for example. Point of use hot topic.
Speaker 2:Very hot topic lately.
Speaker 1:Yes, everyone can relate, whether you're on the OR side or the SPD side. You say point of use and we all know it.
Speaker 2:I think it needs to be a partnership 100%. The OR needs to understand why we do what we do, how we do what we do, and SPD needs to understand how what we do affects the OR. So a lot of opportunity for cross-training, encouraging that like come in, come into our department, see what we do, see the process, follow your case through the process A lot of times. That's really enlightening for the OR staff and I know when we have sent our staff from sterile processing to do observations in the OR, I've never gotten bad reviews. They absolutely enjoy it. It really brings things full circle, like I said before, how the instrumentation is used, how they open for a case, how the little things, such as how we wrap a tray, affects them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that resonates with me from being a surgical tech, Just like you're saying the little things that, whether it wrapped or if we can't open it correctly, all of those little pieces where I appreciate that if sterile processing can come in and see or understand the why it does help, do it differently and show why we do what we do every day.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, it has a big impact.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great that you are able to collaborate at your hospital to get both and be able to bring everybody in like that. I like your word partnership. I think that's important. Anything else you want to share with our listeners today? This has been great talking and I think we covered a lot of areas. Yeah, I think just sterile.
Speaker 2:Processing is constantly changing. Every day I'm learning something new. There's new literature out there that comes across my desk or comes across my social media feed, where it, you know, tickles my curiosity. I'm like I need to look into that more. I wonder why that is. Build your resources, don't be afraid to use them, and just know that a lot of times the work that we do is difficult. It can be multifaceted, but it's the right work. If it's hard, it's challenging, it's probably the right work, especially with keeping patient safety in mind, to provide that top-notch care for all of your patients every single time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. We come right back to the patient safety and survey readiness to bring it home to do what we do every day. So how can people get a hold of you if they want to find out more? Are you on LinkedIn, or can people connect with you there? Yep, sure I am on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:You can find me there for sure.
Speaker 1:Reach out All right. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining me today on the Skills with Jill miniseries. I look forward to bringing you all the next episodes.
