A Helping Hand

The in-plant at Holy Cross Hospital was already small, but budget cuts have brought the number of full-time employees down to just three, including the supervisor of Printing Services, Carl Zalaznik.

“Every department has had to tighten its belt, and summer is always slow in Fort Lauderdale, so business won’t pick up until fall,” he notes.

That said, Zalaznik is still bringing in new work. When the hospital recently purchased an outpatient center from a competitor, necessitating new business cards and stationery, Zalaznik underbid outside vendors and captured this extra business.

To make do with less staff, Zalaznik applied for volunteer help from the hospital.

“There’s a big community of volunteers here, so I submitted a request with a description of the job,” he says. “The lady I have now has been a housewife her entire life, and she’s from Italy, so there was a bit of a language problem at first, but now we’re communicating well and she likes to keep busy. I’ve got her doing some laminating, the folding machine, and other stuff like that, which frees me up.”

Zalaznik also sets up long-run jobs so that he can “work” on his time off.

“Yesterday I had to do a thousand newsletters, so I entered the job in the color printer before I left and let it run during the night,” he says. “In the morning, I was able to fold and deliver it. I do the same thing on the black-and-white printer, filling the paper trays before I leave. Little things like that make up for having one less press operator and one less copy operator.”

Printing Services is also helping the hospital switch away from two-color carbonless forms to a new work system.

“Originally all the forms on patient charts were color coded: physical therapy had an orange bar at the bottom with the logo in orange at the top; nursing had yellow,” says Zalaznik. “We had shelves stockpiled with sheets in these differently colored bars and would print the black on them whenever we received an order.”

Now Printing Services—and the hospital as a whole—is adopting a more standardized form that’s scannable and electronic friendly.

“Nurses can fill out forms at their work stations and print them, including the wristband,” says Zalaznik. “It takes work away from us, but we have fewer press operators and plenty of work as it is.”

—By W. Eric Martin