“gemba walk” (lean thinking term) to go to the actual place where value is added + “walkabout” (Australian aborigine) a short period of wandering bush life engaged as an occasional interruption of regular work
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This week I have the good fortune of participating on a team that is studying the blood transfusion process for elective surgical patients. It involves staff from a blood center and a hospital. It is a worthwhile experiment that will hopefully go well and there will be more attempts to follow with other hospitals in the area.
Today we mapped the current state and (roughly) approximated that 8% of the steps in the current process actually add value from the customer’s stand point. 8%. My hunch is that, as we dig deeper, we’ll find that % to be even smaller. This is a process that I used to be intimately involved in when I was a medical technologist. Back then (30 years ago?) I realized that there had to be a better way and got started on the “quality improvement path”.
Have we seen improvement in 30 years? Healthcare has a million broken processes that are not adding value - and they are becoming more and more expensive to maintain. I can’t tell you that there’s hope, but I can tell you that there’s “hope that there’s hope”.
