Can you count on your on-call general surgeons when minutes count?
Hours-long waiting times in an understaffed hospital Emergency Department affects not only patients’ clinical outcomes, but also patient satisfaction and your community reputation. What’s more, poor follow-up can make this situation even worse, causing gaps in care that lead to avoidable medical errors that have significant financial implications and that impede your facility’s ability to grow.
So, ask yourself…”Can I count on my on-call general surgeons when minutes count? Does my hospital have the staffing model and processes to optimize those essential aspects of delivering effective, efficient emergency care?” If there’s a scintilla of doubt in your answer, your trauma and acute-care surgery program may need emergency care.
What are you doing to stop the hemorrhaging of patients, physicians, clinical staff and revenue as your ED volumes and reputation decline? Are you:
- Still trying to make do with the old-style coverage by rotating members of your community surgeons for on-call coverage?
- Forced to turn away emergency surgical patients due to lack of coverage? Or has your LEMSA already taken care of that…diverting patients because they know you’re ill-equipped to deal with their trauma patients in a timely fashion?
- Trying and failing to recruit and retain ED surgical specialists in your remote or underserved community because they don’t want to work and live there as a suitable career and family move?
- Still struggling with efficient care coordination and best-practice processes across ED surgeons and the rest of your hospital-wide care team? Handoffs between team members are where the greatest and most potentially deadly avoidable medical errors can occur.
Unfortunately, the versatile, broadly experienced general surgeons needed to provide timely, optimal emergency care are flocking to more-lucrative specializations and locations. Many simply don’t want the erratic schedules of ED coverage, especially as an “add-on” responsibility on top of their own private practice.
And frankly, community or locum tenens surgeons who rotate hospital shifts are not, by definition, a coordinated team. They lack the leadership and group mindset to create and follow shared protocols and procedures proven to save lives. This causes inconsistencies and AMEs that can lead to less-than-optimal clinical and financial outcomes, including the cost of readmissions.
Hundreds of hospitals are struggling, and even closing their doors, with the trend accelerating. Will yours be next if you don’t deal with this critical coverage issue?
The SAMGI answer: On-duty surgicalist coverage that delivers best practices
SAMGI (Surgical Affiliates Management Group, Inc.) has decades of experience helping resource-constrained client hospitals provide 24/7/365 on-duty coverage for acute-care and trauma surgeries. SAMGI’s turnkey program helps increase operational efficiency and ensure seamless integration with other hospital departments, including hospitalist programs. SAMGI’s teams are always available to provide the highest level of patient care while fostering integrated processes and care coordination across the hospital.
Led by a dedicated medical director, SAMGI’s teams include board-certified surgeons and other healthcare providers skilled in delivering in-house trauma, acute care, orthopedic, neurosurgery, urology, GI and general surgery services. SAMGI programs provide standardized care grounded in evidence-based best practices that help ensure consistent high-quality care utilizing standard approaches to clinical scenarios that reduce unnecessary tests or delays in care while optimizing clinical, financial and satisfaction outcomes.
What can SAMGI do for you? Click here to learn more about SAMGI and discover the kind of ROI that SAMGI can deliver by bringing its exceptional acute and trauma-level surgical expertise to your organization.
