Lila Price
Game concept & rules
Sterile processing professional and MACSA chapter leader.
Describe it. Guess it. Know your SPD. A team game from Lila Price and Dannie Smith where you win by communicating an instrument clearly, not just recognizing it.
Not another instrument quiz. Draw it, describe it, and get your team to name it before time runs out. It’s the same communication skill SPD and the OR rely on every day.
Every illustration is an original by Surgicaltrey. The deck runs from everyday basics to specialty and robotic instruments, plus the SPD tools you handle every shift. Play the digital version on an iPad or phone at play.surgicaltrey.com →
Two sterile processing professionals who wanted instrument training to feel like game night. Concept and rules by Lila Price; illustrations and clues by Surgicaltrey LLC.
Sterile processing professional and MACSA chapter leader.
Sterile processing educator and founder of Surgicaltrey Education & Training.
Play What’s Your Depth Gauge? in person with Lila Price and Dannie Smith.
Surgicaltrey takes the stage with Lila Price for a live, interactive presentation at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in Long Branch, New Jersey.
Lila Price and Dannie Smith bring What’s Your Depth Gauge? to the KASPP Fall Conference. 8:30 AM – 4:00 PM (doors 8 AM) at 555 N Duke St. Earn 6 CEs toward HSPA and/or CBSPD certification. Registration is $20 and refunded when you check in.
A free game for Sterile Processing Week: daily trivia, SP Week Bingo, shout-outs to coworkers, and leaderboards by person, campus, and shift. No email, no password, and it’s open to every sterile processing team.
New apps and projects from Surgicaltrey Education & Training and its creative studio, Illustrey. No app store, no downloads.
The instrument guessing game, now on an iPad. The host picks the difficulty, the app deals the card with its taboo words, runs the clock, and scores every second left. Steals, bonus rounds, a huddle mode, and an instrument fact after every round. Version 2.0, with team devices and conference mode, is coming next.
The Tray Accuracy Trackers, rebuilt as an app. Log missing instruments as they happen and let the patterns show up on their own: which trays, which instruments, which shifts.
Free tray accuracy trackers from the HSPA 2026 mini-session by Dannie Smith III, now updated with Tray Accuracy 2.0 from MACSA SPD Summer School. Built so SPD teams can turn daily discrepancy logs into the patterns that actually move the needle.
Two editions, same data structure. Pick the one that fits your role — or grab both and pass them to your team. No setup. Drop-downs and formulas already wired.
Low-friction logging for the bench. Three tabs, drop-downs throughout, and an auto-pivot summary that surfaces this week's top patterns.
Eleven tabs of informatics. Dashboards, Pareto signal, specialty and tech analysis, plus an auto-suggested Education Action Plan that pulls live from your top patterns.
BLS & CPR instructor courses and SPD certification prep are in development. Drop your email to hear when they go live — no spam, no marketing list, just one note when something new ships.
The talk started as a 25-minute mini-session at the HSPA Annual Conference in Baltimore. Version 2.0 grew it into a 45-minute session for MACSA SPD Summer School: Sophomore Year. It recaps the three patterns from Baltimore — a few instruments drive most errors, certain trays generate the most, and one category carries the highest risk — then adds the tools to act on them.
Discrepancies enter the workflow at four predictable points: OR case use, case cart return, decontamination sorting, and assembly verification.
Most departments have an instrument graveyard. A recovery system has a dedicated station, tagged new instruments, an owner for retrieval, and a weekly reconciliation.
A step-by-step plan: log for two weeks, sort by instrument, then by tray, build a focused verification checklist, and share the data in a five-minute weekly huddle.
Using data to improve decisions, workflows, and outcomes: track discrepancies, find the patterns, redesign the workflow, then measure whether it worked.
Excel or Google Sheets, generative AI to spot patterns and draft in-service content, and recognition in the morning huddle. No new software or budget approval.
How to bring the pattern to the OR conversation without blame, and how to get your own team to own the fix.
Every SPD department logs missing instruments. Most departments treat each event as a one-off — write it up, move on. But let a few weeks of those reports sit next to each other, and patterns emerge.
The same instruments show up. The same trays. The same shifts. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. That’s the talk in one breath: turning what feels random into something you can actually work with.
You don’t need expensive software. You need consistent data — and a culture that uses it.
The trackers above are the working tools that come out of the talk. Tech Edition for the bench. Manager Edition for leadership. Same data structure, different depth. Built for the SPD community, not sold to it.
If the work resonates, share it with your team. If it leads somewhere — an in-service, a workflow change, a recovered orphan instrument — I’d genuinely love to hear about it.
Surgicaltrey Education & Training is building out a small, focused set of programs for SPD professionals. Here’s the roadmap.
The two Excel templates above. Free, branded, ready to use on Monday morning. Built specifically for SPD discrepancy data.
AHA-aligned BLS instructor and provider courses. Hands-on cohorts in the Philadelphia / South Jersey region, with corporate and hospital-team rates.
Structured prep materials and live cohorts for HSPA certifications — CRCST, CIS, CHL, and CER. Built from a decade of teaching the curriculum, not regurgitating it.
Dannie “Trey” Smith III is a Sterile Processing Educator at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Director of Education for MACSA — the Mid-Atlantic Central Service Association, an HSPA chapter.
With more than twelve years in healthcare and four HSPA certifications, Trey founded Surgicaltrey LLC to put practical, brand-quality educational tools in the hands of the people who actually do the work.