Working in Linen Services at Cox South, Larissa Gibson is used to seeing torn scrubs and frayed edges on room curtains. She saw linen carts coming through the department that had zippers torn or broken and cart covers that needed to be replaced. And she saw an opportunity.
She’s been sewing since she was 15, when she spent a summer visiting her grandmother. Gibson picked up the skill quickly, learning her grandmother’s tricks as they made clothes and slipcovers for her couches. Her grandmother bought her a sewing machine and she started practicing on her own.
It’s easy to see how a woman who made her own prom dress and her own wedding dress would look at a worn cart cover and think: “I bet I could fix that.”
That’s what she told linen manager Patty Scott and Environmental Services director Ronnie Lightfoot about several of the items that were coming through the department. They saw the opportunity as well. Over the last year and a half, the skill Gibson learned from her grandmother has been helping CoxHealth save money and get more out of the resources we already have.
“I was amazed that I had somebody with that skill in my department,” Scott says. Gibson fixed a few hems on blankets and curtains and before long people were bringing her items to repair. “Ronnie and I just decided we need to get her a sewing machine!”
Scott and Lightfoot set up a sewing station in Linen Services and worked with HR to create a job description and a pay scale to make Gibson an official in-house seamstress. Over the last year, the work has expanded and Gibson has devoted many of her shifts in Linen Services to sewing.
In the past, a scrub top with a torn pocket would have become a rag and Cox would spend $13 to get a new scrub top. Gibson is now able to repair those items and get them back in service.
She’s reupholstering stools used in surgery and she’s creating custom covers for arm pads in the operating room.
“If the cushion covers get a pinhole in them, the OR can’t use them,” Gibson says. “But the padding is still good – instead of throwing them out, we can just replace the covers.”
Recovering the pads can be done quickly and it eliminates the need to replace the pads entirely at a cost of $300-$400 apiece.
Her work is also creating efficiencies for staff working on patient floors. The cubicle curtains in patient rooms come in a few different sizes, but the tags would frequently come off, making it hard to tell what size a folded curtain is. Gibson has fixed that by color coding the stitching at the curtain’s edge – when it’s time to replace a red-stitched curtain, simply grab another red one and it’s a perfect fit.
She’s also been able to alter curtains and reattach the netting that can become torn at the top.
“When you have a cubicle curtain that might cost $500 and you can alter it or repair it instead of buying new, that’s huge,” Scott says. “If you have to send something out to be repaired, it can cost $100-$150. Larissa can stitch those back up in 20 minutes.”
The work continues to pour in as more departments find out about Gibson’s talents and Scott and Lightfoot say it shows no sign of slowing down.
“Larissa has a fabulous skill set and a gift,” Lightfoot says. “Last year we saved between $50,000 and $60,000 just by having Larissa use her skills to do repairs.”
Gibson says she couldn’t be happier that the hobby she picked up from her grandma is paying off in her daily work.
“My grandmother is really proud,” she says with a laugh. “She’s one of those people who can do anything: she sews, she was a florist, she does carpentry, she does it all. I try to be a lot like her. She was a great person to learn from.”
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