Sloan MGH PATA - 6297 Words

11-116 January 3, 2012 Massachusetts General Hospitals Pre-Admission Testing Area (PATA) Kelsey McCarty, Jà ©rà ©mie Gallien, Retsef Levi Five anxious faces looked up at Dr. Jeanine Wiener-Kronish, chief of anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), as she entered the conference room. It was June 2009, and the group before her was the task force for the Pre-Admission Testing Area (PATA). PATA had been struggling with inefficiencies and long patient wait times for over two years. Despite the group’s best efforts to fix these problems, a letter forwarded from the president’s office that morning highlighted that conditions in PATA were not getting better. Dr. Wiener-Kronish took a seat and read the letter aloud: Last week I brought my†¦show more content†¦Located in Boston, Massachusetts, MGH was founded in 1811, making it the third oldest hospital in the United States. With 907 patient beds across a 4.6 million square-foot campus and almost 23,000 employees, it was one of the largest hospitals in the country and Boston’s largest private employer. U.S. News World Report consistently ranked MGH as one of the top five hospitals in the nation, and patients traveled from all over the country to receive treatment there. It was also home to the Ether Dome, an amphitheater that served as MGH’s first operating room (OR) and became the birthplace of anesthesia when ether was first publicly administered there as a surgical anesthetic in 1846.2 The DACCPM received its official charter in 1938 and since then has maintained its position as a leader in innovative anesthesiology research. The DACCPM was one of the largest clinical departments in the hospital with 278 physicians and 198 nurses, researchers and administrative personnel. This large work force was needed to support all stages of the perioperative3 patient flow: pre-operative assessment, intra-operative monitoring and care, and post-operative recovery. Due to the nature of the specialty, the DACCPM was also charged with administrative oversight in the ORs, the Post-Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU), the Pain Medicine Center, and the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU). The department’s achievements across many areas of MGH, however, were