Lean Blog Audio

One of the two main pillars of the Toyota Way management system is "respect for people." I've blogged about that often over the past ten years, including this post.Lean provides a philosophy and a management model that should be nothing but good for staff and patients. The idea of "respect for people" might sound nice in principle, but what does it mean in a practical sense. Respect for people can be illustrated in these ten ways, and more:

As often happens, I have too many open browser tabs full of articles that I was going to potentially blog about. Too much WIP (a problem that Jim Benson will discuss in our upcoming Boston workshop).So, it’s time for me to clear out my backlog and to share some articles I’ve been reading with some quick notes, instead of full blog posts. Well, I got my backlog down by three. I’ll try again next week with some shorter blurbs about more articles, perhaps.

http://leanblog.org/audio29 Some of you might know that I'm on the board of a Texas-based non profit, the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation. It's an important organization that helps patients, family members, and hospitals work together in the name of better care and safer care.One of the ways the Foundation helps is their publication "The Batz Guide for Bedside Advocacy." You can get a free PDF version or get a free iPad app version that does even more than a book can. Or, another option is to buy a paperback version via Amazon, which basically just covers costs and shipping. The Foundation gives away a lot of Guides, but I think that the ROI of a hospital or employer purchasing Guides would be overwhelmingly positive (in addition to the core human benefits of protecting people and saving lives). More on that later in the post.

This article caught my attention the other day, primarily because I like scotch, whisky (and whiskey and bourbon). The Japanese love scotch whisky and have long produced a product that's a variation of scotch -- Japanese whisky (the lack of a standardized spelling for whiskey is an endless debate). I'll settle on "whisky."The article: Japanese Whisky Got a Lot of Hype, But Can One Bottle Really Be the Best? Now, you might not care about "the brownest of the brown liquors" (Simpsons reference), but there's an interesting detail in the article about the Kaizen mindset of continuous improvement.

Here's another video in the series that Joe Swartz and I shot at Franciscan St. Francis Health back in October. See them all here or via a YouTube playlist.You might remember pharmacy manager Ronda Freije from two previous videos. Here, she talks about a concept called "Seven Days' Grace." It's a concept that Joe Swartz and I wrote about in Healthcare Kaizen using stories from Franciscan (see excerpts via Google Books).

Today's post is hosted over at LinkedIn, as part of my participation in the LinkedIn Influencers series.The post is titled: "The One Thing Google Should Show When You Search for a Hospital." It's not about Lean per se, but it's about topics that I hope we'd agree are relevant: Transparency of quality and patient safety data Making that data easily available and understandable by patients Using that data to hopefully make better decisions about where we get care Hoping that data, transparency, and choice puts positive pressure on every health system to get better.

http://leanblog.org/audio25 In yesterday's blog post ("Safety is always our top priority" - From lip service to daily practice?"), I challenged hospital leaders to back up the "happy talk" with real action and stories about putting safety first. It's easier said than done.I wanted to share a story from Karen Kiel-Rosser, Vice President/Quality Improvement Officer, at Mary Greeley Medical Center in Iowa. MGMC is a KaiNexus customer, they've recently received the "Gold" level recognition in the state Baldrige process, and she's an upcoming podcast guest (to talk about Baldrige).

http://leanblog.org/audio24 It's really easy to make statements like "patient safety is our top priority." That same statement can be applied to hospital staff, as well.Or, it should. But the "happy talk" (as Pascal Dennis calls it) isn't always followed up by action. When a hospital executive makes the "safety is always our top priority" statement, is it REALLY true? Is that statement backed up by action and integrity or does it just sound good?

"Accountability" is a word that's easy to throw around in an organization. It's often pretty meaningless (or not well understood). What does it really mean? http://leanblog.org/audio23

Recently, I've seen many examples where businesses don't pay attention to little details. When you see little things going wrong, it makes you wonder about the more important stuff. One example from healthcare might be this story from the Cleveland Clinic, where patients told the CEO that there were dust balls under the beds in patient rooms. Why don't staff notice these things? Why don't they have better standardized work for cleaning the patient rooms?What are some of the other problems that I've seen just in the past two weeks?