I am a firm believer in benchmarking. However, I continually see information regarding productivity measurements in CSSD that equate apples to oranges. Measurements of OR cases, trays, size of hospitals, etc. I would argue that none of this information provides adequate information to measure against your peers. For example, at one hospital system, the measurement was trays. When comparing the average number of instruments at their sister hospitals that were in each tray, there was a significant difference. I have found the same type of issues when comparing OR cases with the average number of trays per case. It is easy to see why one hospital would need to staff at a higher level than their peer. We need to standardize our measurement to instruments reprocessed. We need to set standards of how long it takes to reprocess instruments. Internally, we can set time factors for each tray and share reprocessing times in minutes as a comparison.
We can even take our information and measure against productive hours worked to see how productive we are. Just don't forget to track all of your miscellaneous processes, too.
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