Building Predictability in Staffing

My background, being a director, I was very familiar with different types of staffing models, with benchmarks, industry standards. And every client that we would visit would ask us to do a staffing analysis compared to industry standards. So we had a manual tool in order to identify with best practice standard staffing would be. And we would take industry benchmarks based on our ARAN. We would also look at the other organizations. But today I’m going to stay focused on the operating room. So we would take the standards for how many direct staff should have, how many indirect staff, and we would also utilize what we see based on most of the hospitals in the country of how many staff hours per case minute you would require. So we would do a manual overall staffing need and we would say need 10 nurses, 10 surge techs, 15 indirect staff. And it was a manual process, but it really didn’t meet the needs of what our clients were asking for because they wanted to know how many orthopedic staff do I need? How many general surgery? I’ve got a robotic team, how many robotic staff? So we would try to calculate it out manually. And sure, we could do it for a snapshot. We could do it for a moment in time. How many staff we need this month. We could not tell them how many staff they would need in November because we know it’s going to change. They brought in new robot. There’s going to be more surgeons using this. There may be volume increases or surgeons that are leaving. So based on the fluctuations in the organization, we could not staff to that. Unless we would do a comprehensive staffing analysis on a monthly basis. And truly, it’s just not feasible. Our model and what we saw out there just didn’t meet the needs of the hospital. It incredibly labor intense. And it wasn’t solving the problem. It wasn’t answering the questions that I was being asked from directors across the country.