Lately there's been a lot of brouhaha in the media about Lean. It started when the Opposition started questioning the government about the decision to implement Lean system-wide in health. It's been interesting to watch. I'm surprised the story has had legs - usually anything in the media has a pretty short life span. Every day there have been numerous articles and interviews. Much of the debate has focused on cost - why are we spending so much on our consulting group? There also seems to be many differing opinions about what Lean is or isn't.
At times I've found myself almost getting angry over the focus. It seems like it's mostly about scoring political points and not really about seeking to understand. I'm not saying Lean is the fix to all the ills in health care, but I've seen some very concrete examples of what it can do.
Several of my colleagues are working on a mistake proofing project. A mistake proofing project is where a group of people examine a process and do everything they can to eliminate the possibility of a defect from happening. The focus is on making care safe - making it easy to do the right thing, and impossible to do the wrong thing. Every. Single. Time. For every single patient.
My colleagues are working on a project to eliminate defects in specimen labelling for biopsy results. In the worst case scenario, a result could be mixed up. One patient might have a perfectly healthy body part removed, while another might be told they are fine when in fact they have cancer. This team is working to make sure that can never happen.
This project hits close to home for me. You see, they're working with the hospital lab where I had my biopsy. My biopsy showed I need to have both breasts removed. I can't even begin to imagine the horror of discovering after the fact that no, in reality my breasts were perfectly healthy. That my family and friends had been put through (as one radiologist described it) the meat grinder of breast cancer for no reason. All because of a labelling mix up. Because of labels, for crying out loud.
We can argue about how much Lean costs, and who should be delivering training, and all the other logistics. But it makes me angry when we seem to brush aside the reason we started down this path in the first place: to make care better and safer for patients. Those words always resonated with me. But now that I am a patient - now that I am one of those people who needs better, safer care - they mean even more. Is $10 million a year a lot of money? Of course it is. But are my breasts worth that to me? Heck yeah. Is my life worth more than that to my family? Absolutely.
I wish we could be asking the right questions. Instead of taking cheap shots to score political points, I wish we could be looking at how Lean is helping and what else we need to do. But I guess that doesn't make the headlines in quite the same way.
At times I've found myself almost getting angry over the focus. It seems like it's mostly about scoring political points and not really about seeking to understand. I'm not saying Lean is the fix to all the ills in health care, but I've seen some very concrete examples of what it can do.
Several of my colleagues are working on a mistake proofing project. A mistake proofing project is where a group of people examine a process and do everything they can to eliminate the possibility of a defect from happening. The focus is on making care safe - making it easy to do the right thing, and impossible to do the wrong thing. Every. Single. Time. For every single patient.
My colleagues are working on a project to eliminate defects in specimen labelling for biopsy results. In the worst case scenario, a result could be mixed up. One patient might have a perfectly healthy body part removed, while another might be told they are fine when in fact they have cancer. This team is working to make sure that can never happen.
This project hits close to home for me. You see, they're working with the hospital lab where I had my biopsy. My biopsy showed I need to have both breasts removed. I can't even begin to imagine the horror of discovering after the fact that no, in reality my breasts were perfectly healthy. That my family and friends had been put through (as one radiologist described it) the meat grinder of breast cancer for no reason. All because of a labelling mix up. Because of labels, for crying out loud.
We can argue about how much Lean costs, and who should be delivering training, and all the other logistics. But it makes me angry when we seem to brush aside the reason we started down this path in the first place: to make care better and safer for patients. Those words always resonated with me. But now that I am a patient - now that I am one of those people who needs better, safer care - they mean even more. Is $10 million a year a lot of money? Of course it is. But are my breasts worth that to me? Heck yeah. Is my life worth more than that to my family? Absolutely.
I wish we could be asking the right questions. Instead of taking cheap shots to score political points, I wish we could be looking at how Lean is helping and what else we need to do. But I guess that doesn't make the headlines in quite the same way.