Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Surgical workaround

A note from one of our surgeons:

Paul,

I'm writing this out of frustration. The door C334 to the male locker room in the Shapiro OR has been dysfunctional for weeks. You need an access card to open it. The mechanism is faulty and each morning for some time now surgeons, techs etc have had to battle to get in the room and change for the OR.

Efforts have been made to 'repair' the mechanism but nothing has worked.

Please forward this to the appropriate person and have them leave the door unlocked till such time as it can work effectively. People have had to force the door open at times which is causing more damage ( to the door and shoulders).

I just don't know who is in charge of this kind of thing but am sure you can forward it to the appropriate authority.

Response from our head of maintenance a few hours later:

Dan Kendall from our offices was approached on this issue directly and has already both assessed the problem and rectified it. In essence, a staff member had taken it upon himself to tape (surgical tape) the latching mechanism so as to avoid having to use his swipe card for access to the locker room. Some of the adhesive residue remained within the moving parts of the mechanism even after the tape was removed.

Dan was able to locate the individual who admitted to taping the mechanism and agreed not to bypass this (or any other) security measures again. Dan was also successful in removing all remaining sticky residue, and the latching mechanism is once again fully functional.


Note to self: Teach surgeons how to use BIDMC SPIRIT to reduce blood pressure.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Secondary lessage: Fix things yourself and you will be found.

Anonymous said...

Is lack of concern for security another root cause not addressed? Surgery locker room?

Anonymous said...

I believe that was dealt with in the conversation between the security officer and the staff member who taped open the door. In general, the surgeons understand the need for secuirty, in that their valuables are stored in the locker room.

Mark Graban said...

Interesting -- they found the "root cause" of why the door was not working right (the residue).

What was the "root cause" of why that person bypassed the security to begin with? If that's understood, some other new person might do the same thing in the future, right?