True Collaboration: Operation Collaboration

Project Topic:

Improving collaboration and communication in the operating room

Hospital, City and State:

Los Angeles General Medical Center, Los Angeles, California

Unit:

Perioperative (Periop)

CSI Participants:

• Gregory Attaway, BSN, RN, PHN
• Laura Huang-Valeriano, BSN, RN, CNOR, PHN
• Christine Lucena, BSN, RN

Project Goals/Objectives:

1. Increase Healthy Work Environment Assessment Tool (HWEAT) True Collaboration and Skilled Communication scores
2. Implement initiatives to increase teamwork in the operating room
3. Have 90% of staff attend Team STEPPS meeting
4. Decrease nurse turnover rate

Project Outcomes:

1. Decreased nurse turnover from 24 to 14
2. Increased staff morale
3. Increased communication and decreased specimen errors
4. Began to educate all staff about Team STEPPS
5. These outcomes resulted in a positive estimated annual fiscal impact of $1,200,000.

Project Overview:

After reviewing the results of the HWEAT survey, the CSI team determined that the standards we wanted to improve were True Collaboration and Skilled Communication. Since we work in the OR setting, collaboration and communication are key aspects of a safe and successful surgery. The team believed that if we improved collaboration then staff morale, retention and operating room efficiency would also increase.

The interventions we implemented to help achieve this goal included creating a PowerPoint presentation of unit and specialty-specific updates that was displayed on wall-mounted monitors in our main hallway and the placement of erasable whiteboards on each of the OR doors to improve communication and collaboration. The CSI team created a badge buddy to reduce confusion about ordering specimens and then asked the leaders of the Team STEPPS program to conduct a class specifically for the perioperative area.

Our interventions were met with some skepticism at first, but as time went on some of the interventions seemed to help some of the newer staff. By the end of the year when we looked at the statistics, the turnover rate decreased from 24 nurses (11.80%) in 2023 to 14 nurses (1.49%) in 2024.