Are You Missing Your Best Quality Improvement Ideas
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Writen by Donald Bryant
Last month I talked about keeping your quality improvement changes in place using a manual that you develop of SOP's, standard operating procedures. By the way, if you missed that issue, you can find it on my website, and several earlier ones too.
This month I want to address starting a quality improvement project. That is, how do you decide what project to work on? What issue or process is causing the most waste, is doing the most harm, is most affecting the bottom line? Maybe you are a leader at your site and you have an idea of what is generally causing problems. For instance, you may think that patients with catheters are getting a lot of infections. Perhaps, checking patients in at your site is taking too long and creating a bottleneck. Maybe patients are complaining about having to wait too long at check in at a doctor's office. It could be that certain departments are running short of supplies too often. There are many other possibilities. The probability is that unless you are directly involved in the contentious process, you probably are not aware of what the exact problems are and are not aware of possible solutions.
This leads us to the conclusion that in order to discover the many problems facing every organization, especially in terms of wasted effort, time and money, there has to be in place a mechanism for the problems to surface to the leaders from the front lines of the organization. There has to be a way for the leaders to hear about the problems from those who are directly involved. For instance, does anyone in your organization know what ideas the cleaning staff has for making the organization better? When I say that there has to be a way for the ideas to surface, I don't mean that the only ones with a voice should be nursing staff and other professionals. Rather, as in the Baldrige Improvement Plans, the entire staff is involved in quality improvement.
I know of a few hospitals where the leadershippresident, CFO, COO, etc.go out several mornings every week to talk to staff at all levels and patients to see how things could be better and to get some positive feedback about what things are going well. Perhaps at your site you want to start something like this. As time goes by and as suggestions are implemented, staff will feel safer about making suggestions.
Leadership needs to make sure that staff feel safe about making suggestions, no matter what the method of suggesting changes is used. Perhaps you might want to use an anonymous survey for collecting initial suggestions. After some of the suggestions are acted upon, the staff will feel like the leaders really want good ideas and will feel safer making them known. Perhaps you might want to use a consultant in Lean Healthcare (many of these ideas I suggest come directly from Lean Healthcare) to teach the staff the principles and processes of Lean Healthcare and other tools as may seem fit. This approach will help a large organization start making many positive changes quickly, rather than using the idea of slowly spreading the means of change throughout an organization, as some prefer.
Whatever your initial process of getting the ideas percolating up in the organization, after some ideas for quality improvement recommended by the rank and file are successfully implemented and after the improvements and savings are made known in the organization, it is time to create ways to get more ideas. Perhaps you want to have regular meetings with a designated leader and representatives from several staffing areas that will bring up ideas. That means that the rest of the staff must feel comfortable about making suggestions to these team members. If your site has few employees, then perhaps it would be best to have regular staff meetings with all employees where the agenda always includes time for quality improvement ideas and for updates on ongoing projects. Whatever method you decide works best for your site, be sure that an atmosphere safety and security exists for all the staff. This may mean going so far as to guarantee that no staff will lose there position as improvements create more time to get things done.
So, once you have a steady flow of quality improvement ideas being generated by all in the organization, which ones should you act upon? Next month, I'll address that issue. This issue I decided to concentrate on the Define step of Six Sigma's DMAIC (define, measure, act, improve, control). Next, I will discuss the measure segment. Sometime in the future I'll cover team dynamics too.
Donald Bryant helps healthcare providers meet their challenges. If you liked this article and want more free tips, visit http://www.bryantsstatisticalconsulting.com for a free article to help you start making improvements at your site immediately. |
posted by Alexis WATERS @ 12:00 AM,
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How To Know What You Know 3
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Writen by Hans Bool
...In many situations we act without even knowing why we act the way we do...This is no longer desirable when your organization is changing too often...Knowledge Management is (amongst other aspects) about making the "private" knowledge "publicly" available...So that you can bridge the Knowledge Gap...But your organization was not used to this. Different teams applied different principles...And now what?
How to address this new set of principles so that knowledge management is adopted in the primary process?
When existing employees and management get new tasks and when the environment is changed, you cannot longer rely on old knowledge patterns. "How was it, that we did this before? And why doesn't this work no longer?"
Everybody "knows" how the previous organization of knowledge was arranged. In the former setting it was not about people, it was about names: rather than addressing product specialist X, service desk operator Y or Sales agent Z, it was about John (knows al about product A), Debby (knows how to handle difficult clients, pass it thru her), and Ben (that can only be done by him).
In the primary sales process, knowledge was not an issue. The organizing rule was let the "best" (wo)man solve it.
Knowledge management is inherently correlated with the way you organize. If you organize in a competitive way, you will isolate knowledge, you will favour unequal distribution, but most of all you will make the organization inflexible. Little incidents (this number one salesman is leaving...) will have a big impact.
New principles then? And how to apply them?
Your company is not only supported by a primary process of isolated elements. It is the infrastructural glue that takes care that all areas communicate. You can do this only by balancing the activities in the right way; individual bonuses are alright, only if they are accompanied buy team targets. To do that you need to find a shared goal. And sharing knowledge could be one of it.
Once you have addressed this human factor, than you might start to think about infrastructure and systems. Although very helpful, all knowledge management initiatives that start with filling databases on the intranet will fail
© 2006 Hans Bool
Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days. You can apply for a free demo account. |
posted by Alexis WATERS @ 12:00 AM,
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