OR Management

I have to say, after two weeks trying to run the board and learning about principles of surgery center management, I don't find it as fun as direct patient care. Management is a frustrating business. I'm constantly trying to negotiate with surgeons and nurses about optimizing the flow of the surgeries. Changes which should be easy take much longer to happen. Implementing a new policy involves so much red tape. I move mountains to make things happen, and at the end of the day, it saves half an hour. When something goes wrong, the buck stops with me, and I have to fix it, whether it is an emergency or an inconvenience. I went into medicine to take care of patients, not systems.

Nevertheless, it was a really enlightening and educational experience. It taught me to be aware of the surgery center as a whole. By the end of the rotation, I knew what was going on in each room; I knew which surgeons and anesthesiologists were where, which rooms had delays, which rooms were moving fast. I knew where my resources were if something went wrong. I had a good grasp of how to make things happen. I became a better leader. I learned about my management and communication skills. And I got a keen awareness of the things that matter in our medical system to administrators. I learned where our inefficiencies lie, where we can make improvements. I have a little better sense of why the American health care system is so broken. I know how gargantuan a task it is to fix it.