Application Of Kaizen

The Toyota Production System is a framework of concepts and methods to provide best quality, lowest cost, and shortest lead-time

- Deepak Agarkhed

We often find incidents like the patient being dispensed wrong medicine by the pharmacy, nurse not attending patients on time, patient fall on account of slippery in rest room, etc. Although hospital will have incident reporting and corrective action, there are often no efforts made to take preventive action to avoid repetition of problem.

The healthcare delivery system has multiple processes in places with range of skilled to semi-skilled people like clinicians, nursing, housekeeping staff, engineering technicians coordinating with each another in number of ways. It is often noticed that in spite of having standard operating procedures (SOPs) in place for each process, there are no efforts to check its practice on ground and how efficiently and effectively they are helping the ultimate customer i.e. patient. There are several tools and techniques to address these issues including lean management principal developed by the Toyota Motors.

The Toyota Production System (TPS) developed by the Toyota Motors is a framework of concepts and methods to provide the best quality, lowest cost, and shortest lead-time through the elimination of waste. The Kaizen forms important part of TPS success.

Kaizen is Japanese term for continuous improvement. The word Kaizen is taken from the Japanese Kai “change “and Zen “good”. Philosophy of Kaizen is to develop culture among employees to actively engage in improvement activity. Implementation plan includes organising events focused on improving specific areas within organisation. Kaizen is typically stated to as incremental improvement but on a continuous basis and not limited to supervisors and managers in organisation.