Are You Missing Your Best Quality Improvement Ideas?

Last month I talked about keeping your quality improvement changes in place

using a manual that you develop of SOPs, 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 doctors 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 dont 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, Ill address that

issue. This issue I decided to concentrate on the Define step of Six Sigmas DMAIC

(define, measure, act, improve, control). Next, I will discuss the measure segment.

Sometime in the future Ill 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.

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