Inpatient Perioperative and Interventional Services: Looking into the Future
Featured Guest Contributor
Sam Wald, MD, Associate Chief Medical Officer and Vice President Inpatient Perioperative Services
Sam Wald, MD
The hospital's record growth in procedural volumes and utilization present a special challenge to our team. The physicians, nurses and staff have shown incredible dedication time and time again in delivering complex, but compassionate care in the operating rooms, catheterization-angiography-interventional radiology labs and endoscopy suites. We will all be pressed even farther as we continue to expand in our current space before the 500 Pasteur building opens its doors.
We support the needs of our patients and medical staff with an answer of either "Yes" or "We're working on it." The objective is to never say "no" to those who require a surgery or an intervention at Stanford. This has, however, required creative solutions to mitigate the relative shortage of perioperative space and sometimes beds both on the regular units and the ICUs.
This past year, we have implemented several strategies to allow for uninterrupted patient flow. The Ambulatory Surgery Center currently accepts up to four patients per night, Monday through Thursday for overnight stays. The staff members have been exemplary advocates for C-I-CARE and patient comfort in this budding program. Another area of growth has been in the robotic surgery program including the Departments of Surgery, Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, Cardio-Thoracic, Urology and Gynecology. We offer our patients two of the newest technologies, the Xi robots and a fully upgraded Si robot which have been purchased this past fiscal year. Robotic surgery is being performed in both the Main OR and the Ambulatory Surgery Center. The physicians have been collaborative across multiple specialties to share this limited resource. The Anesthesiology Department and nursing teams have shown enormous support for the program, which is highly integral to providing cutting-edge treatment for our oncology patients.
As we continue to develop even more robust surgical and procedural program expansion, an important consideration will be to better predict our procedural times and better communicate delays to both our patients and physicians when they occur. We have made it an initiative for this coming fiscal year to address both the difference between the scheduled time and actual time in our areas and to look for methods to convey information within our intricate system. Your help is needed as we engage all of our resources to improve on our scheduling process and we seek your input.
Lastly, when the new hospital opens, the workflows for our inpatient health care structure will need to change. We will be performing procedures in three distinct locations, with different geographic and space considerations in each. However, it is our ambition for the experience to be the same no matter where care is given within the interventional platform. It is my sincere hope to make it as easy as possible for physicians, nurses and staff to be able to provide patient care in the most collaborative and supportive environment possible.