I’m sure you have all be in the same place as myself, we are dying to get our transport times down and ensuring we provide the top-notch patient experience while doing it. While that is occurring, we struggle with ways to relocate other items across the facilities with such limited and lean resources. As you do not want to pull from the patient experience or cause transport delays, utilizing patient transporters for non-patient transports is an easy way to utilize in house staff for these types of requests.
The first area to focus on is what exactly you want your patient transporters to move outside of patient care. Spread the request across too many items and you could dilute your staff. Have them hyper-focus on a few items first to review the need and outcome. I started with patient beds. It started with a build-in our system for request, which was no small task. Once that was completed, units could enter their request via our online system and it would auto-assign to the next available transporter. Once that was in place, the education and training began with our staff. Once all was completed and we implemented the program, we saw 0 decrease in our transport times and 100% efficiency increases in our bed movements and availability.
Throughout the years, I’ve reviewed the utilization and moved other items to the patient transport department. I mostly focus on assets that are utilized in patient care. This has not only centralized this process but it also reduced inefficiencies and increased product/asset availability to our patient care units. I also incorporate these transports into the overall efficiency reports for the departments, treating these moves the same as the patient moves.