“The Lean Way”
(I am sharing my experience from a training program conducted for staff nurses and pharmacists of a private hospital located at Coimbatore. The program is about “Implementation of Lean Healthcare Methodology”. This is the continuation of Part – 1)
Part – 2 –“The Lean Way”
The reason behind why we need continuous improvement is because of the changing behaviour of consumers. Consumers’ expectations are changing frequently and their needs are varying from one individual to another. Today consumers are expecting personalized and customized products and services. This changing behavioural pattern influences manufactures and service providers for the implementation of lean methodology.
You can ask me how? –“The Lean Way”
If we want to survive in our business we need to satisfy the consumer. If we want to satisfy the consumer, we have to understand their expectations. If we understand their expectation of the consumer, we can easily satisfy the consumer. If we try to satisfy the consumer, we will focus on providing quality products and service.
So two main guiding concepts of lean methodology helps you to understand the consumer expectation and to provide a quality product and services through various tools and techniques. As well as everything centred around people. Actually speaking about “The Lean Way”:
It helps us to set a goal.
It helps us to set our destination.
It helps us to identify a path to reach our destination.
It helps us to identify a better path to reach our destination effectively and efficiently.
It helps us to provide solutions for the problems that we face during our journey.
That’s why I called it “The Lean Way”.
Let me give you an example.
(I pointed out two staff members and requested them to come front. In that one staff member looks bulky in appearance and another one looks very slim.
I looked at both of them and said “Please don’t take anything serious and is only for understanding purposes”.)
Now I looked out at the audience and said that we have two different persons in front of us. Both are extremely different in their appearance. Now the question is about to list out the advantages of the person who is looking slim.
Audience started to share the points as below:
The person who looks slim can easily bend down.
She can walk fast.
She can run fast.
She can easily enter small places.
She looks young compared to that bulky one.
She needs less intake of foods and stuff.
2 meters of white cloth is enough for her to stitch her dress materials (all started to laugh)
She will be more active.
She accommodates minimum space while travelling in the bus.
She can easily hide anywhere.
I interrupted and said, enough enough….
You can list many things and I hope that now you can predict what I am going to say here.
Yes, this is the advantage of being lean.
Let me list out the points you shared above by correlating with commercial terms.
Efficiency in performance.
Much faster.
Need minimum maintenance cost.
Easy to transport.
Need minimum space which we can say as minimum operational cost.
In a single word it can be said as maximum output with minimum input. Am I right? (They accepted)
(I thank both for their participation and ask them to get to their seating place.)
Let me correlate to your healthcare service.
If we implement practicing lean methodology, we can minimize patient waiting time for each and every diagnostic process.
We can provide service to maximum patients with available resources.
We can minimize the material and inventory cost.
Easy accessibility of instruments and medicines.
Effective monitoring of patients.
We can avoid overcrowd.
Less workload for staff and doctors.
Less stress for staff and doctors.
We can minimize the overall cost and expenses which leads to more profit.
In a single word I can say it as you can provide “Quality of Care”, which is most important in your healthcare services. Even expectations from the patients are also the same.
Actually, I gave a brief introduction about lean methodology. There are a lot of things to learn about lean methodology and I will cover them one by one in the coming training sessions. If you are really interested to know about the history and evolution of lean methodology, there are a number of books on the market and I will suggest you some of them to read if you contact me personally.
