Capital & Coast DHB staff win awards for “thinking outside the square”
Staff from Capital & Coast DHB have picked up four awards from the Health Roundtable for projects which aim to improve the patient experience of hospital care.
The four staff members have taken part in a series of workshops in Sydney Australia which drew together health professionals from both sides of the Tasman to learn about a set of approaches called “Lean Thinking”. In a health context, Lean Thinking involves using five key principles to enhance the quality of healthcare by improving flow in the patient journey - and by doing so eliminates waste.
Viv Murray (Quality Leader) and Paul Smith (Charge Nurse Manager for ambulatory care in the Wellington Blood & Cancer Centre) jointly won awards for “Best Patient Story” and for “Best 5S Project”.
“What the Lean Thinking approach gives you is increased awareness and a toolset so you can step back and look at processes in line with the bigger picture,” Viv Murray says.
Paul Smith says the results can be very practical and of significant benefit to patients. “The ‘Best Patient Story’ award we received was for following the journey of a patient with breast cancer. By improving the processes around the type of visits breast cancer patients have, we managed to halve the amount of time these patients had to wait from when they were first assessed to when they complete chemotherapy treatment.
“The ‘Best 5S Project’ award we received was for our use of a toolkit to identify and eliminate system inefficiencies. The project we did using the ‘5S’ toolkit enabled us to move a truckload of files out of the Blood & Cancer Centre at Wellington Hospital to storage off-site. That created extra space in the centre and also made it simpler to access the files we really need on a day-to-day basis,” Paul Smith says.
The two other C&C DHB staff members who attended the Health Roundtable workshops – Astrid Koornneef (Operations Support Manager for Medical Services) and Dawn MacPherson (Clinical Nurse Educator for Ward 1) were equally successful – also picking up two awards from the Australasian roundtable – for “Best Waste Audit” and for “Best Value Stream Map”.
“The first award we won was for ‘Best Value Stream Map’,” Astrid Koornneef said. “For that we did a project which showed a detailed and step-by-step map of the activity required to refer a patient to the Day Procedures Unit. Putting all those steps down on paper truly showed what an intensive and complex process that is, and that will help us and the staff involved to identify ways to potentially streamline that process.”
Dawn MacPherson says the second award she and Astrid received was equally revealing. “We won ‘Best Waste Audit’ for a project which identified the amount of time some Registered Nurses spend doing administrative work – and the results were startling. For example, the amount of time nurses spend searching for files results in lost time which – across our services – is the equivalent of one full-time RN working full-time doing nothing but look for files. I think the potential for improvement there is plain to see.”
All four agree the workshops were a very useful exercise, which have given them tools they will continue to use through their professional lives.
“In essence the Lean Thinking tools are very simple ones,” Viv Murray says. “The projects we won the awards for are all on-going, but I’m sure that each of us will be looking at a lot of different aspects of the way other things are done and applying these sorts of tools to improve them.
“One of the key principles of the new Regional Hospital is that we shouldn’t automatically keep on doing things the way they are done. That principle challenges us all to step back and think about the ways things can be improved – and tools such as these Lean Thinking ones will be valuable in identifying real improvements for patients, and accompanying improvements for the DHB,” Viv Murray says.
