Staffing in CS

[Guest]

I am trying to locate information or standards on staffing in a small hospital central supply department. Can anyone offer any insight? Thanks.

[David N.]

Hi,

I have a guide from the Association for Healthcare Resourse and Materials Management (2000 guide) that has a benchmark that the average hospital has 5.1 FTE's per every 100 beds. If your department is also transporting supplies to areas of the hospital, you add another 1.3 FTE's. 1.1 FTE's would be for CS administration...all total would give you 7.5 FTE's per 100 beds.

This is only a guide, and may not take into account other functions of CS that you are currently doing....David Narance

[ladyj]

thanks
It seems that may be for General stores staffing - does it take into consideration for cases done in OR or # of rooms in OR. WE also do all the equipment for the hospital and clinic area and etc.

[Todd]

I manage a small SPD for an 80 bed hospital. We have 6 main operating rooms and 4 day surgery operating rooms. We also provide pacer case carts to the 2 cath labs and c-section case carts to OB. Plus instrument processing for several clinics. We function with 16 FTE's and staff 24/7. We only have one SPD person here at night and weekends.

[Sheri]

We are an 80 bed facility also. We have 3 people that work (staggered shifts) from 7am-4:30 pm. We do total implants galore, general, Urology, eyes, ENT, Endo, and some vascular. We service all of the floors and the ER, Cardiolgy, Radiology, & Lab. As we add more surgeons to our staff, we are getting busier and busier. We dont finish up cases here til 5:00pm or after on most days. How is it that you can prove that you need more FTE's? Im not sure what formula they are looking at when they figure out how many they think we need, but it certainly doesnt appear to be the one you are looking at.
David, I am one of your neighboiring hospitals and I have toured your department. How many do you have working for you? I believe you also do distribution, dont you?

[johnfmartin]

There is no better benchmark then those you create yourselves internal to your facility.
I would recommend: using number of processed items as your workload drivers.
processed items can be number of trays and peel packs produced, Number of trays decontaminated. Number of case carts picked, restock carts done. These are the buckets used by Solucient benchmarking for the University Hospital Consortium (UHC)
If you have the equipment pool you can use the number of issued items both outbound and inbound for decontamination.
Look at the total number of the above produced or processed items in a 24 hour period. Then what was the total number of worked hours for that 24 hour period.
Divide the number of worked hours by the number of produced items to come up with your worked hours per Unit of service. That is your starting point. Process improvements including staffing, training etc can then be used to reduce the worked hours per processed item as a basis for productivity improvement opportunities.
Hope this helps
John