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This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast, and we are live at the business
and operations of ASCs.
I am joined right now by Sarah Sterling,
who serves as the director of area operations
for the Greater San Francisco and Greater Silicon
Valley areas
for Sutter Surgery Center Division.
Sarah, thanks for being here today. Would love
to have you start off by taking a
moment to introduce yourself and tell us a
little bit more about the work in your
industry?
Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having
me today.
I am the area ops director,
within Sutter Health in our surgery center division.
We have 36,
ASCs and one surgical
hospital,
mostly in Northern California and in Southern,
California.
I have been in ambulatory care for 25
years
and 18 of those years in the ambulatory
surgery center space.
Wonderful. Well, thank you for being here.
And let's start our conversation today with ASC
volume.
So this is expected to increase by 16%
across the country by 2032.
So with this growth, what is the most
pressing challenge to maintaining a positive patient experience?
Yes. So I think
for us that the most pressing challenge is
having enough physicians, enough providers,
and staff to care for those patients in
our
community,
with increasing burnout,
and
in the era of COVID
and changing how people want to work when
people want to work,
is is definitely challenging. So we have to
have enough people to care for our patients
in our community.
And
it's also
ensuring that we energize
and engage those providers
to continue to be resilient and compassionate
to to care for our patients.
And going along with that, what strategies have
worked for your organization as you tackle some
of these challenges?
And what is the recommendation you have for
health care leaders to stay ahead?
Yes. Absolutely. So in our organization,
in terms of having enough providers and staff,
there are a couple of things that we're
doing. We are now training, have GME programs
to,
train our own providers,
and hopefully stay within our organization.
And we have a saying within Sutter Health.
It is patients first and people always.
And so we've been really focused
on
engaging not only our patients, but our staff,
in in being compassionate towards our our patients.
And so it's spending an incredible amount of
time and investment in our people to decrease
the the burnout,
allowing them to be innovative and engaged with
with the care that they provide.
Well, thank you for those insights.
And what are some best practices or strategies
that you recommend to leaders
striving to align staff with organizational
goals and patient satisfaction rates, and what has
worked well for you in that area?
Yes. Absolutely. So I think it's really important
for leaders,
in engaging their staff that in everything they
do and in every meeting, every huddle, every
1 on 1, every staff meeting,
that leaders are ensuring
that their frontline staff
know what the organizational goals are, the mission,
vision, and values,
and connecting it to purpose in everything they
do. If a staff member has an idea,
challenge that employee
to connect it to the purpose, connect it
to the goals and the values of the
organization, to always keep it top of mind
that everything that we do and we create
and implement
goes back to those goals, those metrics, those
KPIs.
I think that's really important. And for patient
satisfaction rates,
our organization,
I actually,
lead the initiative for the patient experience within
our surgery center division.
And what we've done is we've created a
team of individuals
whose primary focus
is improving and increasing those patient satisfaction scores.
Although we're a large healthcare organization,
this can be simply applied to a lot
of those smaller,
ASCs
if they have a couple of people to
create a committee. The one thing that I
will say that we have to remember to
do, and as I mentioned in the session,
yesterday here is that we can't forget the
patient along in this journey. We need to
have patient advocates in our meetings,
when we're in building designs or if there's
a new process. We need to make sure
we have the voice of the patient at
everything that we do.
Wonderful. Well, as we wrap our conversation up
today, do you have any closing remarks you'd
like to share on the podcast?
Yes. I think just, closing remark is that
I would just really, really encourage people. I
don't think we do it enough in organizations,
as I mentioned to bring patients along in
that journey.
We are in the business that's taking care
of people and need to ensure that we
meet their needs and give them a voice.
Wonderful. Well, Sarah, thank you for joining me
today on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. Again, we
are live at the business and operations of
ASCs. Thank you.