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Healthcare Facilities

Secrets to Sustainable Improvements in Hospital Operations
Friday, April 24, 2009

Have you tried to implement process improvement in your hospital?  Is it working?  If not, then it's likely you hit one of the fundamental barriers of change:  Ownership.

Change cannot be imposed from above.  For change to happen, it must be developed from within.  Those individuals who must change, must own the change.

Change is not yours, nor management's.  It is owned by the staff.  It is their change...or change won't happen.

Here's how you do it:  It starts with a thorough collaboration with users-at all levels. 

Users are those individuals who work and function within the hospital.  They are physicians, nurses, nurse-practioners, orderlies, administrators and outside agents such as patients, visitors, vendors, etc.  The collaboration process is designed to engage all of the users in identifying solutions that both improve productivity and reduce cost.  Some refer to this as needs assessment, but it needs to be much deeper than that.

The proven approach:

  • 1. Group the users based on roles and functions
  • 2. Engage them in work sessions
  • 3. Listen to all ideas, analyze their impact both acute and enterprise-wide, and identify optimal solutions they can own.

The key to success is ownership. If they participate, they take ownership and drive change.  When they own it, they make it work.  Change cannot be imposed, it must come from within.

Through this collaborative needs assessment architects can begin to develop core areas needed for design:

  • Site/land analysis
  • Staff/space forecasting (near and long term)
  • Operational patterns assessment and development
  • Critical adjacencies for site and facility requirements
  • Order-of-magnitude cost estimate of all the requirements identified

So how do all of these pieces come together to form the design?  Check out next week's post, Creating Design Solutions.

 

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