GI Unit Leadership: Shaping a High-Performing Endoscopy Unit (Virtual)

Video Transcription

Video Summary

The speaker discusses proactive delay management in endoscopy units, emphasizing its importance as a leadership responsibility rather than just an operational issue. Delays are predictable, measurable, and preventable, but when unmanaged, they cause staff frustration, physician dissatisfaction, revenue loss, and quality decline. Four main delay zones are identified: scheduling fragility, patient readiness, turnover vulnerabilities, and institutional bureaucracy. Effective leadership involves using data to design realistic schedules, ensuring patient preparedness through mandatory pre-procedure calls, fostering accountability and communication during turnover, and navigating hospital-specific challenges like shared resources. The speaker highlights the value of lean principles, emotional intelligence, and maintaining quality metrics such as withdrawal time and adenoma detection rates. Regulatory burdens should be managed to avoid burnout. Implementing delay dashboards and promoting data transparency supports continuous improvement. Ultimately, delays should be seen as leadership opportunities to optimize performance, protect patient outcomes, and build resilient, high-functioning endoscopy teams.

Asset Subtitle

Mankanwal Sachdev, MD, FASGE

Keywords

proactive delay management

endoscopy unit leadership

scheduling fragility

patient preparedness

lean principles in healthcare