Patients seeing benefits of QHC's internal reviews
Patients are benefitting from a series of reviews of Quinte Health Care processes, the corporation’s board has heard.
The reviews are called “kaizen” events, using a Japanese term for improvement. They’re part of a philosophy of “lean processing” borrowed from the automotive manufacturing industry.
Chief of Staff Dr. Dick Zoutman said one of the most recent reviews has slashed by 75 per cent the time needed to transfer a patient from intensive care to an inpatient unit.
“We reduced the time from six hours to an hour and a half,” Zoutman told reporters.
“This means that patients are transferred in a more rapid manner, with less motion and use of resources and more timely transmission of critical medical information to the receiving inpatient unit,” he wrote in a report to the board.
The changes happened during a three-day study in October and have been implemented permanently.
“In industry, if you don’t follow lean processing, you’re going to go out of business.
“Hospitals need to follow suit.
“There’s an enormous amount of waste in the system that can be retrieved; it’s nobody’s fault,” he said.
Wasteful practices accumulate over time, he said.
Zoutman compared the process to cleaning out a garage in springtime and wondering, “Why do we have all this stuff lying around?”
In transfers from intensive care, he explained, the delays included the sending of multiple copies of files.
Streamlining transfers means patients move into and out of the intensive care unit more quickly.
“There’s someone waiting for that bed, almost certainly.”
Past descriptions of the kaizen events might have surprised listeners: one, for example, resulted in the board hearing about the benefits of addressing the placement of supplies and garbage cans.
But Zoutman said there have been many cases in which significant improvements have been made.
“Pulling patients from the emergency department up to the bed on the medicine floor was previously 240 minutes. That’s four hours.
“It’s now 40 minutes.”
Tidak ada komentar