Trudy Wiig, RN, FACHE, administrator of Kerlan-Jobe Surgery Center, worked with her hospital partners at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles throughout the pandemic to coordinate care for patients.
The pandemic strengthened the relationship between the two entities and fostered a more positive culture at the center. Ms. Wiig shared with Becker's the changes her center made last year and the biggest lessons she learned.
Question: What is the smartest thing you did in the past year to set your center up for success?
Trudy Wiig: Many of us reacted to the COVID-19 crisis by evaluating our priorities, discovering that God or a higher power, family and job, in that order, had become out of sequence. We recognized being closer to family was more important, being present for the kids a priority, being more caring in our relationships with our family, friends and co-workers. Caring and positivity may have become a misplaced skill that was left behind by many in their busy routines. It's the people that make the place, and our focus shifted to letting go of negative personalities and disruptive teammates, and we began anew by creating a spirit of teamwork, camaraderie and positivity, holding ourselves and each other accountable for our responsibilities.
We found time too short and life too fleeting, and challenged our teams to increase soft skills and critical healthcare skills through education, creating opportunities for learning and developing succession planning so the work environment that those positive moves created can be carried forward by the individuals coming after us. This work remains in progress, but to a person, our people feel it’s the largest lesson learned from the past year and our biggest win. We have a future to look forward to, and our center is better for these positive changes in how we plan, play and work.
Q: Did the pandemic make your relationship with hospitals better or worse? Why?
TW: We have good relationships with our hospitals now and prior to the onset of COVID-19. In a show of solidarity we closed our ASC mid-March to all but urgent and emergent cases to ensure we did not take items in short supply, such as personal protective equipment and cover-up linen garments needed at the hospital, and volunteered our staff to assist theirs.
During the COVID-19 resurgence in late December 2020 and January 2021, at the request of our hospital partners who closed their outpatient activity to protect dwindling inpatient and ICU beds, we accommodated several surgeons whose cases were unable to be performed in the hospital outpatient setting. Not all cases on our surgery schedule should be assumed 'elective.' Many are not, and represent new fractures, ruptures or significant tears requiring minimal wait for repair, or the likelihood of an uneventful and successful recovery diminishes with time.
Assisting our hospital partners solidified our relationship with them, and they with us. We both discovered many new ways we may be of service to each other, our patients and our community during these unprecedented times in our recent history. We are better, stronger, quicker to adapt.