Posts tonen met het label ward. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label ward. Alle posts tonen

2010-10-20

Nurses: what is the meaning of lean for you?

To prepare for a training, the Elisabeth Nursing Surgery Ward (B2) posed all nurses the following question:

What is the meaning of lean for you?

This offers the opportunity to get an idea of how lean thinking is experienced by nurses. Before interpreting their answers, it is good to know that they have had a basic introduction of lean thinking one year ago, and especially started to employ 5S for Workplace Organization with enthusiasm. Furthermore they have put the Lean principles impressively into practice during the development of care pathways. However it was not explicitly communicated to the nurses that they were applying lean (and that explains why you don't see that in their answers).

Their answers to the question per nurse:

2010-06-23

How to mobilize an entire nursing unit

A recurring question is how you can mobilize an entire team, unit or department to work with lean. Too often, I see small groups of enthusiastic people who are wondering how to get the rest involved. One element you can use is a training for the entire unit. For the department of Orthopaedics this seemed to work well.

Recently, the department of Orthopaedics organised one evening and one day training in the Lean principles and tools for the entire care unit (60 nurses). They were very well prepared! Four months before the training day, they started to prepare and work towards it. All three departments (secretary, nursery department and outpatient clinic) got a digital camera in November to photograph improvement points or irritations (based on an idea of Neruosurgery, see previous blog), which provided more than 50 photographs of concrete waste or unsafe or unpleasant situations. These pictures have been printed on A3 size and laminated. At the training a reward was given to the person with the most striking picture. These pictures were used as starting points for improvements. Smart, because in this way you directly got 50 points of improvements provided by the people themselves on which they want to work.
 
They also made a movie for the training. They have put the process in scene from the moment that the OR calls for a patient to come for surgery until the patient is ready to leave the nursing department. This process takes 15 minutes, because the patient must change clothes, visit the toilet, medication is given and the bed prepared. The movie showed a lot of types of waste (that were actually not put in scene, but really happened). Employees recognized these immediately. A few examples:

2010-04-12

Photo contest to bring lean thinking closer

Part of lean thinking is activating and recognizing all grey areas in your team. The ward Neurosurgery of the St. Elisabeth Hospital created a beautiful intervention for this: a photo contest to visualize improvement opportunities.

They purchased a digital camera and placed it on an easily accessible place. Everyone of the ward was invited to take a picture of something that annoys them at that time. A few weeks later this resulted into 40 (!) photos. The prize for the best photo was two cinema tickets (cinema= seeing….of waste). Here is the winning photo:

Angela Rutten, who is quality officer of the department, gives an explanation of the photo: