Lean means lower costs
Published Friday October 16th, 2009
Health care: Pilot program will apply Toyota's management style to make hospitals run more efficiently
FREDERICTON - The efficiency system that helped transform Toyota into the world's largest automaker soon may be helping New Brunswick nurses improve their working conditions.
Marilyn Quinn, president of the New Brunswick Nurses Union, said Thursday a pilot program for the so-called "Lean Process" will be launched in the coming months in an as-yet-unnamed hospital.
Quinn said nurses are interested in Lean, sometimes called Toyotism, because it promises to allow more focus on patient care and less on administrative distractions.
"We got into it because we recognize there are a lot of inefficiencies in the workplace and things that are required of our nurses that really take them away from the care that they should be providing," Quinn said in an interview.
"We looked at it in terms of designing the workplace so it is more conducive to the work that needs to be done."
The pilot program is being designed by the Department of Health, which is still working out details.
The Lean system has been used by businesses for years. It is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota production system that focuses on improving overall customer value through efficient production.
It is now making its way into the public sector, especially health care, where it helps improve the flow, or smoothness, of work and eliminates duplication.
"Hospitals in Saskatchewan are using this and Lean has been used in Britain in the health care sector for some time," Quinn said.
"Here in New Brunswick, you sometimes get nurses wasting time filling out multiple requisition forms when one is all that is needed, or someone else could handle it. That's the kind of thing we're looking at."
The Lean program is one of a number of efficiency measures being investigated by the New Brunswick government as it looks at ways to control the soaring costs of the public service.
"The nurses union and the Department of Health are using Lean methodology to look at how hospitals are organized and see if there is a more efficient way so our nursing staff could be more productive," Carolyn MacKay, deputy minister of human resources for the province, said during a meeting with the editorial board of the Telegraph-Journal.
MacKay and Doug Tyler, deputy minister of strategic priorities for the Liberal government, said streamlining measures in the civil service are being focused on back-office operations.
The civil service refers to part one of the public service - government departments and agencies. Parts two and three of the public service cover the much larger education and health sectors.
Tyler said there are about 1,700 civil servants who are considered back-office workers, such as the people who handle payroll, human resource development and IT support.
He said the shared services program, launched in March of 2008, will rationalize back-office positions.
"The government is committed to trying to streamline that, to find more efficiencies in areas like IT and payroll and bring that number (1,700 workers) down," Tyler said.
"But even if you bring that number down considerably, it's a small part of the total number of people if you are not tackling the people who are delivering front-line, day-to-day services to the people of New Brunswick."
MacKay said the hunt for efficiencies in government administration extends to such minutiae as "ghost telephones" that stay plugged in and active long after they are needed.
As well, she said it involves eliminating such things as multiple, costly printers in favour of single printing stations.
"We want to put all of our back-office services under a microscope," she said. "There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there."
The government also has launched FacilicorpNB, which is a shared services agency created by the Health Department to handle non-clinical services such as laundry, banking and telecommunications.
It's estimated that the regional health authorities could save millions of dollars annually by centralizing these non-clinical services.
Disabled
Search Articles
More CE Network Sites & Partners:
Comments (5)
All comments are subject to the site Terms of Use. For a full commenting tutorial click here.
Our editorial team relies on filtering technology and our visitor community to identify inappropriate comments. In the event that a site user has submitted offensive content that has evaded our filter, please select the option to Flag As Inappropriate presented within the comment. Thank you for helping to keep this site clean.
The company I used to work for went with the Toyota model - and ended up screwing up so many departments (trying to fit round pegs into square holes )that we lost at least 30% of our customers & a good portion of really good people who did their own jobs really well during the implementation.
This was about 5 years ago. This might work for some manufacturers, and assembly lines, but to apply to all people, it just doesn't always work.
The only procedures that offered some benefits were keeping certain stations that were related close to each other, but with the wrong people doing the jobs, the benefits were lost.
We never recovered from the changes or regained customer confidence. I hope this doesn't happen in the hospital system.
Hopefully centralizing the nonmedical services will help save $$. Maybe looking at some of the staff who are just there becuase their parents, or a relative referred them would help too.