Improving Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety through Lean Methods (1 Day Class)

The lean methodology and management system provides a number of approaches for improving quality and patient safety in very practical ways.

One of these lean quality methods is called mistake-proofing, sometimes called "poka-yoke."  In health care, this is often called a "forcing function."  Mistake-proofing is born of common sense, simplicity and detailed process knowledge, but combines nicely with the findings of cognitive psychology and human factors engineering.  It is an ideal tool to improve the recommended actions that come out of teams doing pro-active risk assessment, FMEA or root cause analysis. The vocabulary and approaches included in this seminar will provide these teams with the skills and knowledge to permanently change processes in ways that reduce human errors and lead to more precise actions and outcomes.  If you are using double and triple checks in your process and still have errors… If you depend on the vigilance of workers to stop errors…this seminar is for you.     

Outline:

• Introduction to mistake-proofing in service industries\
  • What is mistake-proofing?
  • How does it apply differently in services (instead of manufacturing)?
  • Medical examples
• Current directions in patient safety
  • Where does this fit with all the patient safety work I’m already doing?
• Benign failure design
  • Why stopping the process vs. allowing an error to occur
  • Determine how to stop when errors occur
  • Case study
• Facilitating precise action
  • Applying cognitive psychology and human factor research to patient safety
• Design examples
  • Examples galore
  • Use an A3 approach to designing and implementing a mistake-proofing design
• A proposal for action
  • Do something easy that makes a difference when you get back to the office

1. Click here to view info and the archived presentation 

Professor Grout is a recognized expert on this topic. John has researched mistake-proofing extensively for the past 17 years. In May 2007, John’s book “Mistake-Proofing the Design of Healthcare Processes” was published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality as a government document that is distributed free to the public and can be downloaded here (pdf). In 2004 John received the Shingo Prize for his paper, The Human Side of Mistake-Proofing with Douglas Stewart.

Our educational events are designed to cater to a limited number of participants. If you must cancel a registration, refunds can be issued until the set refund date (20 business days prior to the start of the workshop series). After that date, no refunds will be processed. If you cancel after that date, you will be given a credit for the full amount paid, good for one year (for either yourself or someone else in your organization). You are responsible for contacting LEI to facilitate receiving the credit. To cancel please call LEI at (617) 871-2900.