Get ready for Clinical Practice Redesign - Saskatchewan Medical ...

Ministry plans to LEAN the system
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Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Health is in the midst of an
ambitious plan to alter the way it strategizes and delivers
health care across the province. If successful, the
province will be the first in Canada to introduce the lean
system of management to all of its 43,000-plus health care
workers and managers.
Dan Florizone, deputy minister of health, says the 50-year
project will include everyone from the nurse practitioner
in a remote northern clinic to dozen-member teams in big
city operating rooms.
“This is transformational,” Florizone said. “No state or
province that I’m aware of in the world has attempted it
on this scale.”
In 2008, Florizone was recruited to the ministry from
his post as CEO of the Five Hills Health Region in Moose
Jaw largely to lead the introduction of lean management
across the provincial health system. Florizone had instituted
the lean system in Five Hills, which acted as a test
site for the province’s early dabbling in the philosophy.
Pilot projects in that region reduced injuries and eliminat-
health care
ed a backlog of jobs for maintenance workers, squeezed
in more colonoscopies without increasing spending and
juggled supply carts to cut down time professionals spent
doing inventory counts.
A last-minute redesign of the Moose Jaw Union Hospital’s
ER has also paid off. In a recent Health Quality Council
survey of emergency room patients, respondents gave that
hospital some of the best ratings in the province for waiting
times and quality of care from health-care workers.
What is lean management?
Pioneered by Toyota, lean methods have been embraced
by players in the manufacturing and service sectors. The
key is to look at a product or service from a customer’s
perspective and identify waste or aspects a customer
wouldn’t pay for by choice. Defective products, waiting or
walking back and forth to see different health-care workers
have no value in the eyes of consumers.
Eliminating waste every time a step is repeated can add
up to significant gains, according to the philosophy. The
ideas about what constitutes waste have to come from the
SMA News Digest Spring 2012 11