The Pre-Evaluations Clinic nurses are a skilled team of clinical professionals who play a critical role in surgical success — often without ever meeting patients in person. Their work bridges the critical time between a patient’s clinic visit and hospital admission, ensuring that every patient arrives ready for surgery and every care team has the information they need.
This team conducts comprehensive chart reviews to ensure all required documentation and testing is complete and up to date. This includes a meticulous review of consent forms, histories, physical exams, laboratory results and other essential records. Their work requires strong attention to detail, sound clinical judgement and advanced critical thinking to identify and resolve issues before they become barriers on the day of surgery.
Delivering Care Through Connection
While much of their work happens behind the scenes, Pre- Evaluation Clinic nurses connect directly with patients through pre-operative phone calls placed 24 to 48 hours prior to surgery. During these calls, nurses conduct a final chart review, assess patient readiness and provide detailed instructions to optimize the surgical day experience.
These conversations play a meaningful role in reducing anxiety, answering last-minute questions and setting expectations for the surgical day — contributing to a smoother experience for patients and care teams.
Standardizing for Safety, Clarity and Efficiency
A key opportunity for improvement was identified in how these patient calls were conducted. Previously, nurses relied on selfdesigned templates to guide their discussions. While effective individually, this approach led to inconsistent information sharing and made follow-up more challenging when a different nurse had to step in.
To address this, the Pre-Evaluations Clinic nurses collaborated to develop a standardized call script and template. This improvement ensures consistency across the team, reduces duplication of effort and ensures continuity of communication. As a result, call times have shortened while clarity, efficiency and reliability have improved — benefitting both patients and staff.