You’ve been hired as a lean coordinator at a major hospital and your job descrip

Question

You’ve been hired as a lean coordinator at a major hospital and your job description requires you to look for ways to reduce costs and, from an operational perspective, improve patient outcomes. You’re looking at patient data and discover that between two or three times per month, a doctor will leave a sponge or other foreign object inside of a patient during an operation. It’s always a different doctor so it isn’t a question of a physician’s competence.

You’re presenting a recommendation to senior management on how to eliminate the possibility of leaving sponges (or anything else) inside of a patient. In one to two paragraphs, describe your recommendation. (think of this as a process and not an individual failing)

Explanation / Answer

One of the most common and well known problems found in healthcare facilities includes leaving foreign objects like sponges, towels, needles, or small instruments inside of a patient after operation. This might cause serious harm to the patients and also result in death in some cases. Besides, it would also harm the hospital’s reputation and cost millions of dollars in legal procedures and penalty.

In order to avoid such problems from lean perspective, the management can take several steps. First of all, they need to find out the reasons for such negligence and mistake. The major reasons causing the same are lack of adequate policies, poor communication and coordination between the doctors and associates, failure to comply with set procedure, as well as lack of staff training and understanding.

The adequate solution to the problem will be to keep an accurate record of inventory used in the operation procedure. There needs to be a standardized system where at least two individuals would be responsible to count the equipment and the surgeon should verify it before and after the operations. Strict policies and procedures need to be made to ensure that every individual involved in the process comply with their roles and responsibilities. The staff needs to be educated and trained regarding the problems that can take place due to such incidents. All these steps would help in reducing such errors significantly.    

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