In the current healthcare environment, cost containment has become more important than ever. Perioperative services are often scrutinized as they consume more than 30% of North American hospitals’ budgets. The procurement, processing, and use of sterile surgical inventory is a major component of the perioperative care budget and has been recognized as an area of operational inefficiency. Although a recent systematic review supported the optimization of surgical inventory reprocessing as a means to increase efficiency and eliminate waste, there is a paucity of data on how to actually implement this change. A well-studied and established approach to implementing organizational change is Kotter's Change Model (KCM). The KCM process posits that organizational change can be facilitated by a dynamic 8-step approach and has been increasingly applied to the healthcare setting to facilitate the implementation of quality improvement (QI) interventions. We performed an inventory optimization (IO) to improve inventory and instrument reprocessing efficiency for the purpose of cost containment using the KCM framework. The purpose of this quality improvement (QI) project was to implement the IO using KCM, overcome organizational barriers to change, and measure key outcome metrics related to surgical inventory and corresponding clinician satisfaction. We hypothesized that the KCM would be an effective method of implementing the IO.

This study was conducted at a tertiary academic hospital across the four highest-volume surgical services - Orthopedics, Otolaryngology, General Surgery, and Gynecology. The IO was implemented using the steps outlined by KCM (Figure 1): 1) create coalition, 2) create vision for change, 3) establish urgency, 4) communicate the vision, 5) empower broad based action, 6) generate general short term wins, 7) consolidate gains, and 8) anchor change. This process was evaluated using inventory metrics - total inventory reduction and depreciation cost savings; operational efficiency metrics - reprocessing labor efficiency and case cancellation rate; and clinician satisfaction.

The implementation of KCM is described in Table 1. Total inventory was reduced by 37.7% with an average tray size reduction of 18.0%. This led to a total reprocessing time savings of 1333 hours per annum and labour cost savings of $39 995 per annum. Depreciation cost savings was $64 320 per annum. Case cancellation rate due to instrument-related errors decreased from 3.9% to 0.2%. The proportion of staff completely satisfied with the inventory was 1.7% pre-IO and 80% post-IO.

This was the first study to show the success of applying KCM to facilitate change in the perioperative setting with respect to surgical inventory. We have outlined the important organizational obstacles faced when making changes to surgical inventory. The same KCM protocol can be followed for optimization processes for disposable versus reusable surgical device purchasing or perioperative scheduling. Although increasing efforts are being dedicated to quality improvement and efficiency, institutions will need an organized and systematic approach such as the KCM to successfully enact changes.

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