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A Simple Help Guide Gave Offsite Anesthesia Teams a Lifeline When Crises Hit
Overview
What was the reason for the change?
When anesthetizing patients offsite, the anesthesia providers are cut off from others in their department. Should a team need additional help, the local staff may not know how to call the charge anesthesia providers or obtain additional personnel to help the offsite team.
What were we trying to accomplish?
Protocolize the process to for non-anesthesia teams to contact help for anesthesia teams working offsite.
How will we know that a change is an improvement?
When an anesthesia team asks a local care team (i.e. interventional radiology) to call for additional anesthesia help and the team knows who and how to call.
Implementation
How long did it take to get up and running?
This was easy and took very little time.
How was readiness assessed & required resources identified?
We discussed the proper chain of communication with the team that runs the board and shared the plan with the nursing management of the sites where we provide anesthesia services.
What were the missteps and lessons learned along the way?
The largest issue was the printed image was lost in communication with nursing in some of the off-sites and required further communication.
Solution Design
What changes can we make that will result in an improvement?
Create a protocol with clear directions and place it in central locations throughout the hospital where anesthesiology teams care for patients.
What was your implementation strategy and critical steps?
First, we worked with the board running team to clarify exactly who should be responding to offsite emergencies. Then we wrote this out in a clear format with phone numbers and scripts so that the call could be clear and concise. Once that was approved by the board running team, we cleared with the offsite nurse management hanging the protocols near central phones.
Adoption & Sustainability
How did you communicate the tactic to those affected by it?
Individual discussion with nursing management and follow-up to ensure that the communication had been shared.
- crisis management
- NORA
