You can’t prevent all problems, but you can mitigate them.

In the world of EVS management, you can never expect everything to go perfectly to plan. Team members call out, unplanned events occur, mistakes are made; it’s the nature of managing any team. But, when patients are depending on the accuracy and efficiency of your team for their smooth recovery it becomes crucial to manage things effectively. Without effective EVS management it may take longer for patients to get out of recovery. Operations can slow down if a supervisor or even a nurse has to clean something that’s missed. Worst of all, a patient could contract a new infection while in the care of your hospital.

All of this can reflect poorly on the supervisors, managers, and directors for not addressing these issues. The problem is that you cannot fully prevent unexpected EVS issues, but you can mitigate them through various techniques – including the use of software – to find the causes at their source, address them, and possibly reduce the occurrence.

We can look into these mitigation strategies from three perspectives to help understand every potential pain point. First, the cleaners are on the front lines and need the ability to address issues as they come up, while also managing their routine cleanings as accurately as possible. Second, from the manager’s perspective, those HCAHPS scores reflect directly on them, and they need to know their team is addressing every possible issue and routine cleaning efficiently. Lastly, from the patient’s view, they expect – and deserve – the best, safest care possible. If they do not receive a high level of care, their reviews/feedback will reflect that and directly affect HCAHPS scores putting your entire facility in a negative light.

Taking all of these perspectives into account we can look at the best ways to help mitigate these risks and errors, and why taking just a few steps back to analyze can make all the difference.

EVS Management from Every Angle

We have some mitigation strategies to make your entire EVS team more efficient while managing service requests in all areas of your hospital, including some of the features you will find in our newest software product, “Rapid Service Responder”.

Find Patterns.

In the fast-moving world of hospital operations, it may be difficult to identify recurring issues. But doing so can help your team prevent events before they become a problem. You can try conducting a survey or audit of problematic areas for a given week, reviewing these areas hourly to determine the frequency, and recording the sample data.

While this may give you insight into preventable issues, it can be hard to carve out time and resources for such an assessment. Using software, such as our EVS module, Rapid Service Responder (RSR), can automate the task, giving you up-to-date information on your entire facility at any given time.

Move Quickly.

With such a large team and so much to manage it can feel tricky to react to problems in a timely manner. But, by addressing these issues quickly you can prevent problems from going beyond a quick clean. For example, you could set up more stops on your team’s route to check on susceptible areas like restrooms or lounges. Being preventative is key, but many problems you can’t predict. Once again using our RSR software, you can dispatch the closest team member when an issue arises, allowing you to respond quickly without slowing down your ongoing operations.

Listen to Patients.

Everything you do in your facility is for the same end goal – to support your patients’ health and wellbeing. Their feedback is crucial for mitigating problems throughout your facility. Listening to them will give you the data you need to become proactive in the future. But, how can you collect that data in a timely way? You could ask patients for their feedback on your facility, or take note of every sort of concern brought up by your patients to determine struggling areas that are more prone to needing service. You could even try to conduct surveys exclusively with repeat patients to find recurring issues. With RSR, you can start collecting data the moment patients request service. Using this information, you can rearrange cleaning routes, replace broken hardware, or restock items in a more timely, efficient manner.

Working Together

When you think of it from everyone’s point of view, we can better understand the many variables of managing an effective EVS care team. Mitigating small issues before they become large problems saves your EVS team time, energy, and resources.

Having real-time and trending data is key to successful mitigation strategies. Think of your hospital facilities as an intersection: If you have an intersection with high traffic and potential accidents, you can’t just expect to put a stop sign down and all your problems will go away. You have to first monitor the traffic going through the intersection to determine if a stop sign is actually going to help, or if you might even need to escalate it to needing a traffic light instead. The same strategy applies with EVS management. With the right data in your hands you can make informed decisions about how to maintain the high-”traffic” areas in your facility to keep everyone safe and healthy.