Solving Challenges at Your Site With a Lean Approach
Adopting Lean techniques to solve problems in healthcare settings is difficult for almost any organization. The transformation into a Lean organization requires significant cultural changes. I think the change would be similar to moving to a new country and having to learn new customs and a new language. You have to learn to act in new ways and think differently. The changes involve the adoption of new ways to finding solutions to problems, implementing the solutions, and sustaining the solutions. Many of you might know this as the Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycle.
One attitude that needs to be adopted is the continuous quality improvement mindset. If you adopt this mindset then you believe that processes and outcomes at your site can always be better. It’s similar to the idea that you can always do more to improve your personal health. Too often doctors and managers think that the way things work is just fine and that their site is very efficient. Then there are those who think outcomes could be better but only concentrate on clinical outcomes and those involved in clinical processes. Practitioners of Lean realize that everyone and all processes at a site are interconnected-clinical and administrative staff and that there is always room for improvement.
read moreTwo Lean Tools You Can Use to Improve Processes at Your Site
In quality improvement engineering there are many tools. I would like to illustrate a few and show how they can apply to healthcare. I will be using tools taken from Lean Manufacturing, an approach used at Toyota Motor Company for many years now. These tools are easily adaptable with a bit of imagination to healthcare. I am not proposing that all healthcare should blindly adopt Lean as the new flavor of the month, but if some of the tools fit your site well, then use them. From my experience, the best progress in quality at a site is in the identification and use of quality improvement tools that can be mastered by the employees of the site. There is no use in being a Jack-of-all-trades and master of none.
Two tools that seem to go hand in hand are 5S and Point of Use Storage. 5S is sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain. In the most recent issue of Quality Progress (American Society of Quality’s magazine) these tools were applied to storage areas. A storage area should only contain items that are useful to tasks that are performed nearby. For instance in an examination room there should be a good assortment of bandages, but it probably doesn’t make sense to store printer ink in the exam room. This is an example of point of use storage. Further, any storage area no matter the size should be well ordered. You don’t want to have too many of any one item; it is better to have in stock what is needed for a day or two and restock as needed. That way, you can have a wider variety of items in the storage area and will waste less time going to look for a supply when it is needed and it isn’t nearby.
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