Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Apply Management Improvement Principles to Your Situation

Can’t Always Believe Somebody Saying “Toyota Would Tell You To...”
We’re not literally hanging “andon cords” or putting tape around every piece of equipment just because a factory does it. We have to be solving hospital problems and not just copying tools. I get that...
There’s going to be variation in healthcare and we have to plan for that and make sure patient care comes first. We need to have a reaction plan for how to try to get back on schedule (and part of that approach could be to have buffer times for charting during the day instead of doing all of the charting at the end of the day).
Well said. Don't surgeons use something equivalent to "tape to make visible if the right tools are ready"? It sure seems like something like that would be wise to me.

The whole idea is to take principles first (and then tools) that are helpful and apply them to your situation/system. The business type will affect decisions (likely software businesses or hospitals will be more similar to those in their industry than others due to some features of that that of business) as will your specific organization.

If you design a system to have much more cross training of people then it will allow you to take advantage of that compared to another organization that instead focused more on specialization.

The decisions you make about individual aspects of the management system will impact what options are sensible for you in any particular instance. It is helpful to challenge yourself by thinking what would others do with this type of dilema but it is helpful not in letting you copy something they do but rather to provide you a new perspective.

Related: Curious Cat Management blog posts on health care - Curious Cat management blog posts on quality tools

No comments: