Lean management in healthcare revolves around bringing value and alleviating staff and patients’ daily burdens. Therefore, instead of emphasizing saving costs, healthcare organizations using the Lean management model center on maintaining high levels of morale, satisfaction, safety, and quality. They accomplish this by making the whole workforce acquainted with the management system and employing it to foster continuous process improvements. Lean healthcare entails placing the patient’s interest first.
Success in healthcare is explained by patient experience and outcomes. However, lean management defines every worker’s work using the same standards (Prado-Prado et al., 2020). Accomplishing this requires that one understands the patient’s situation. For instance, a team can examine patients’ steps when they come for a checkup. This assists the team in determining and alleviating patient barriers like physically filling out paperwork rather than online, moving into a facility to get auxiliary services, or waiting for answers, providers, or services. Improving wait time brings valuable benefits, like assisting patients with the timely care they need. Patients will also be more accurate and thorough when presenting information concerning present medications. This helps physicians to make informed medical choices and prevent any accidents.
Lean management drives the whole staff to improve in the areas critical to the firm. Leaders can use this model to set goals, whereas team members can develop their objectives to support them (Demirdöğen et al., 2020). For instance, when a health facility plans to decrease central line infections by eighty percent, then all teams dealing with central lines are part of the goal. This model improves employee engagement and satisfaction by allowing them to be valued and critical contributors to the firm’s success and mission.
There is also no denying that safety and quality can never be attained. They always need to be sustained. The lean management model offers workers the culture and structure to maintain safety and quality in their daily work. Lean management also acknowledges the significance of encouraging staff to foster improvements. It is possible to improve when employees are motivated to lead first (Helmold et al., 2022). A critical component of Lean is valuing the proficiency of the people doing the work. Additionally, leaders demonstrate respect by becoming the problem-framers. With respect to healthcare, this means that leaders will daily go to the locations where patients are given care, see what the teams are doing, and motivate the staff to improve. In their role as problem framers, leaders provide tools and time to team members to determine inadequacies and then come up with and adopt more efficient approaches. This eventually makes the whole team to be valued and engaged. Additionally, this helps to improve team satisfaction and patient care.
The lean management model can also be applied in healthcare because it focuses on saving time and preventing injuries by decreasing motion. When healthcare employees engage in different movements in their workplace that do not benefit the patients, waste in motion happens (Helmold et al., 2022). Increased walking as a result of poor building design is an example of the motion of waste that lean management helps to solve. When implementing the principle of lean healthcare, healthcare firms use different tools to achieve change. Emphasis is often placed on superior care and patient satisfaction. Using lean, healthcare organizations can obtain the joint intellectual knowledge of their staff to maximize the patients’ value.
References
Demirdöğen, G., Işık, Z., & Arayici, Y. (2020). Lean management framework for healthcare facilities integrating BIM, BEPS and big data analytics. Sustainability, 12(17), 7061. Web.
Helmold, M., Küçük Yılmaz, A., Flouris, T., Winner, T., Cvetkoska, V., & Dathe, T. (2022). Lean Management in Healthcare and Hospitals. In Lean Management, Kaizen, Kata and Keiretsu (pp. 221-227). Springer, Cham. Web.
Prado-Prado, J. C., García-Arca, J., Fernández-González, A. J., & Mosteiro-Añón, M. (2020). Increasing competitiveness through the implementation of lean management in healthcare. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(14), 4981. Web.