Case Study
New Zealand clinic manages inventory with surgical precision Scalpels, sutures, and implants, oh my!
With hundreds of stock items consumed
@tidyint
Doria Kao, Management Trainee, Tidy Doria recently joined Tidy full-time after completing the internship programme last year. She majored in Strategic Management at the University of Waikato where she was highly involved with representation, mentorship, and teaching at the management school. Passionate about training and learning, she looks forward to bringing this ebullience to Tidy’s customers and employees.
each day, how do clinics track it all?
In their fast-paced facility, Rodney Surgical Centre has discovered the secret to managing a smooth, structured, and tidy clinic. This article is
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avigating the need for surgery is never easy, and when amplified by the turbulence of COVID-19, accessible and stress-free solutions are of paramount importance. In New Zealand, Rodney Surgical Centre (RSC) provides top quality medical services while making them convenient and straightforward.
Today, in the high growth regions of Rodney, Kaipara, and Hibiscus Coast, RSC is still the only private surgical hospital in the area. Consequently, their operating rooms are busy. This equates to a high volume of surgical instruments and materials constantly being consumed. Fast-paced procedures
RSC is a private surgical facility based in Warkworth, about 60 kilometres north of Auckland. As a day-stay hospital, patients are moved in and out efficiently, served by specialist doctors who travel to the clinic to operate. The space provides these specialists with access to nurses, administrative staff, and surgical equipment for operations.
Imagine this: you’re a nurse in the operating theatre of an endoscopy, peering over at the surgical tray as the doctor swiftly discards swabs and scopes and brushes. Hurriedly, you jot down each material used, and just as the surgery wraps, another patient is being prepared to be brought in. You rush to organise the next patient’s papers, and the process repeats.
Born from the lack of local access to high-quality, timely surgical care, RSC has been on a mission to provide excellent rural healthcare since 2009. By pairing state of the art facilities with proximity to home and comfort, RSC mitigates the need to travel to Auckland for surgery.
In the early days, this was the reality for nurses at RSC. With patients being billed for time and materials used in the theatre, it is vital that nurses record everything quickly and precisely. In a slower environment, it might not matter if an item or two are missed because inaccuracies can
be corrected between sessions. However, at RSC, there is little time for error. Furthermore, with multiple surgeons rotating in and out of the clinic, each with varying preferences for different tools, keeping track of stock isn’t as simple as preparing the same tray of materials each time. The paperwork problem Like many other hospitals and clinics, RSC deals with a lot of paperwork, patient files, and duplication of records. This leads to unnecessary inefficiencies, with administrative staff often needing to manually copy the same forms across different systems. “Orders, arrived purchases, stock use, and invoicing for consumables and stock take were all done under different systems that did not interact with each other,” says Marianne Davidson-Beker, CEO of RSC. This disconnect adds to the pile of paperwork, but how do you get these systems to communicate with each other?
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