Dr. Jake Taylor Jacobs

And I want you to think about how your organization talks about SPD, not in official documents, in real conversations, in the hallway, in the leadership meeting, when the SPD director isn't there.

What do you have?

It's a call center.

It's always reactive.

It's a necessary headache.

We just have to manage it.

The language reveals everything.

When you call something a necessary headache, you've already decided it can't be excellent.

You already lowered your expectations.

You've already accepted dysfunction as the baseline.

And here's the thing.

That acceptance becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you believe SPD will always be reactive, you don't invest in making it proactive.

If you believe it's just a cost center, you don't treat it like a strategic asset.

If you believe it's a headache to be managed, you don't give it the attention that will make it stop being a headache.

The belief creates the reality it predicts.

While SPD is the starting point for perioperative turnaround,

Now, let me explain something that took years to fully understand.

When health systems want to improve perioperative performance, where do they usually start?

The OR, makes sense, right?