By Matt Swanson, Director of Operations, BS, MLS(ASCP), CLSSBB
July 29, 2020There are mysteries hidden in your department.
Even
the best of your staff members, they carry secrets. Secrets related
to how they’re handling their assessments and what they’re
telling you they’ve done.
Those
secrets are easy to keep hidden, until it’s time for an audit.
Then,
the moment of truth arrives:
“Oh yeah, I was wondering about that assessment. I thought I took it last August. I never did get a score back.”
-
“It should be OK. I work in the clean room every week, I follow the procedures.”
-
“I already took an assessment – are there really two of them?”
Just
like that, you have a deficiency. Your confidence in your department
is a bit shaken, and now you have a Plan of Correction to write up.
As if you didn’t have enough work already...
The
education and training for a variety of healthcare professions is
quite challenging. We went through it, and we know that if formed
the foundation for our continuing development in our careers.
Chemistry? Check.
-
Physiology? Check.
-
Statistics? Check.
-
Clinical Theory? Check.
-
How to keep up with Competency Assessments? What?
Most
of us learn on the fly the administrative realities of managing a
department of professionals. Unless you started out on a management
track, people rarely receive formal training before being thrown into
a management role. Somehow, you’re expected to know how manage a
complex HR system such as a competency assessment program.
Competency
assessments, amongst other management duties, are critical to the
overall operation of your department. Whether it’s nursing,
pharmacy, laboratory, radiology or a host of other departments, an
organization has a responsibility to assure the competence of its
staff. Training can be almost useless – unless there is some sort
of assessment that follows.
The
administrative burden of executing an ongoing assessment of your
staff can be quite heavy. This is doubly true when you are working
with a paper-based system. We’ve all been through automation
efforts in our respective fields. Gone are the days where paper
charts are the norm. Paper prescription slips? Vanishing. Paper
requisitions for orders like Lab or X-ray? Pretty much gone as well.
Automation is key in managing and performing assessments, just like
everywhere else.
StaffReady
offers a completely paperless solution for Competency Assessment,
regardless of discipline. We provide a customizable platform where
the client creates and uses their own assessments. No cookie-cutter
templates, no more rigid assessments that don’t really reflect your
operational realities. Assessments of all kinds are automated so
that department leadership and all employees are kept informed of
what tasks to complete by what date.
It
can be quite demoralizing the respond well to a citation of
deficiency on top of an already full plate. Yes, you and your
department will get through it, and you might find those missing
assessments. But these are the types of distractions that grind away
at morale, dragging a single department or an entire organization
down.
“Work
that is frustrating” is often listed amongst the most frequent
reasons for high employee turnover (references
1,2,3,4, and see our white
paper here).
Automation that eliminates the paper chase, assigns tasks, and
grades assessments autonomously provides
an escape from assessment drudgery. You’ll be able to uncover
those mysteries before an auditor does!
Interested?
Take a look at our website,
and check out our approach. Take a look at some screenshots
to get a feel for StaffReady’s intuitive dashboard.
For
more information or to schedule a demo, please contact us at
info@staffready.com
.
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References
(accessed 07/17/2020):
Matt Swanson is the Director of Operations at StaffReady. He came to StaffReady with 29 years of experience in the clinical laboratory, with roles varying from Bench Tech to Operations Management to Consultant to Business Intelligence Analyst. He became a Certified Lean Six-Sigma Black Belt in 2017. Find Matt on LinkedIn.