When hospital people say they don't want to be a factory or “we don't want assembly-line medicine,” the statement often goes unchallenged. What is the statement or the anxiety behind such a statement? I sometimes challenge in a friendly way and ask who in a healthcare audience has ever been a factory. The answer, usually, is not many.
People fear or assume that a factory is a cold, heartless, mindless, monotonous, repetitive, dirty, unsafe place where robots dominate and stupid people are treated shabbily. This perception may have been true in the past and pop culture references reinforce that factories are generally nasty places to work, including:
- the Lucy and Ethel chocolate factory
- Charlie Chaplin's film “Modern Times”
- Family Guy episodes where Peter Griffin is miserable at a toy factory
- the movie “Gung Ho”
- the thoughtless GM TV ad with the suicidal robot
And we had this WIRED Magazine factory bashing (they didn't print my letter to the editor after initially asking for my contact info).
In my talk, I set the stage that, of course, not all factories are terrible workplaces. I share examples like Toyota, Alcoa, FastCap, VIBCO, and Autoliv (the last two being factories where I've toured with healthcare leaders who learned a lot of great lessons about a quality and improvement culture).
I'm glad that a growing number of hospitals are open to learning from manufacturing, aviation, and other industries. This mindset change is still very much a work in progress and many healthcare organizations still say “only those with healthcare experience need apply.” There are, though, many job postings out there from hospitals that WANT to hire those with Lean manufacturing experience.
Factories are, from my experience, very people-driven places, even when there are robots. They are socio-technical environments, often with a heavy focus on the social and political. Great factories treat everybody with respect (see Toyota's “Respect for People” principle). “The factory is not just a big machine,” as Paul says in the video with Dr. Wei.
So what are some of the Lean Mindsets (an earlier talk of mine) that can be learned and transferred from manufacturing to healthcare? Some of the aspects of a Lean factory that CAN benefit healthcare (without doing something silly like putting an operating room table on a moving line):
- Provide support systems that allow staff & clinicians to focus MORE time on the patient
- Minimize patient delay and movement
- Safety first. Seriously
- Lean factories, including Alcoa, focus strong on employee safety
- Make developing people a top priority
- Use kaizen for people development, not just ROI, as Toyota is doing during the tsunami parts shortages, unlike GM which lays off workers.
- Engage everyone in improvement every day
- A theme of my upcoming second book on daily kaizen for healthcare (title still needs updated)
- Be a “gemba leader”
- Get out of your office and engage with everyone as a leader and coach
I'm not trying to say all factories are great (I worked in some bad ones) and I'm not saying healthcare should blindly copy from factories. But the reality in many cases is that factories can be more customer-focused (John Toussaint says that the Ariens snowblower factory treated their products better than the hospital treated patients) and factories can be great workplaces where the employee engagement and empowerment is often far higher than hospitals.
We can change the culture and approach in healthcare – combining newly developing operational excellence with the strong tradition of clinical and technical excellence. Lean helps hospitals EXCEL at what they want to be – caring environments that provide the best patient care.
What are your thoughts and reactions, as a manufacturing reader or a healthcare reader? I can post more notes and thoughts after the talk too.
Links & Videos Referenced in My Talk “Why Your Hospital Should be like a Factory… or at Least Some of Them”
Here is a collection of links referenced in my talk at today's World Congress Leadership Summit on Process Improvement in Healthcare: “Why Your Hospital Should be Like a Factory… Or At Least Some…“
The links below are for the benefit of the audience (to dig deeper into some slides and to see some videos I won't be showing), and it maybe provides some interesting reading and viewing for you…
Factory Imagery Videos: (Chaplin, I Love Lucy, Family Guy): www.leanblog.org/factory
“Lean and Loving” in Dutch Healthcare: www.leanblog.org/holland
ThedaCare “Nurse Server” Video: www.leanblog.org/server
Rightsized Capacity in Sweden: www.leanblog.org/sweden
Park Nicollet Cancer Center: www.leanblog.org/parknic
Paul Akers, from FastCap, shared a video he shot with a visiting physician. I might not have time to share the whole video during my talk, but take a look:
A second video with reflections from a doctor who visited FastCap:
VIBCO President Karl Wadensten on hosting visitors from healthcare:
Comments from healthcare visitors to VIBCO:
Please scroll down (or click) to post a comment. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Let’s work together to build a culture of continuous improvement and psychological safety. If you're a leader looking to create lasting change—not just projects—I help organizations:
- Engage people at all levels in sustainable improvement
- Shift from fear of mistakes to learning from them
- Apply Lean thinking in practical, people-centered ways
Interested in coaching or a keynote talk? Let’s start a conversation.
In ThedaCare’s book On the Mend Dr. Toussaint describes the ThedaCare leadership team’s first visit to Ariens, a company that makes lawncare and snow removal equipment. They were very impressed with the goings on and in the book he commented how impressed they were and how the snowblowers were treated in many cases better than the patients they treated. I think it would be interesting to hear him explain on that but certainly the defect rate with snowblowers would likely be lower and there would be less delays. A senior leader in my own organization recently said to our leadership group that 98% quality (20,000 defects per million) in meeting CMS measures in no longer acceptable. This is in 2011! Healthcare has a long way to go. I wonder how many hospital CEOs would admit that there are likely factories down the road that treat their products better than their own organizations treat their patients.
Having worked factory lines for many summers and healthcare for a while, there are parallels and differences, both can be respected and both can/should be improved.
And having recently gone through some lean training (that did not emphasize respect of the worker and work, enough for me) the facilitator did the TPS factory model and then asked us visualize the hospital service delivery in the same way. Perhaps he had it backwards.
What if you ask the audience to tell you what the sequence of healthcare service steps are, what is the patient’s condition prior to admission and (hopefully) at time of discharge. Graphically, it can be the same value stream model that TPS uses, however might want to keep all the language in ‘hospitalese’ Essentially do a virtual gemba eliciting what they do and convert it into lean graphic. One element to factor in is the PI/QI/QA components which are common to healthcare and tie in factory models for continuous improvement. Sometimes, in healthcare, the improvement piece is more reactive than proactive so there is opportunity there too. Once you have their healthcare flow graphic in place, under it place a factory flow model. Ask what they see as similarities and again respect the perceived differences.
Hope it is a blast and goes well Mark, keep us posted!
Intriguing topic for your keynote, Mark. As you know, I spent many years in factories. Now with an armful of experience in hospitals, I’ve been thinking lately that hospitals are more like manufacturing than people are willing to acknowledge. Regarding your Lean Mindsets, I’d add process focus. Excellent factories have great depth of knowledge of their processes. Hospitals generally do not. Hospitals tend to lack process discipline (in the broad sense) and heathcare leaders are not especially “process literate.” This is something that healthcare could learn from manufacturing.
Yes – process focus is definitely one of the running themes looking at the examples and stories I have in the talk. That’s a mindset that’s easy to just have in mind and not call out in a bullet point, though. I agree that hospitals often tend to focus on individual excellence and hard work and workarounds (being a hero) more than having repeatable processes.
Another video that Paul Akers posted with Dr. Mora’s thoughts on visiting FastCap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aCShyWFmcs&feature=youtube_gdata_player
[…] my talk at today’s World Congress Leadership Summit on Process Improvement in Healthcare: “Why Your Hospital Should be Like a Factory… Or At Least Some…” The links are for the benefit of the audience and it maybe it provides some interesting reading […]
[…] Wiljeana Glover on May 13, 2011 · 0 comments As Mark Graban stated in a recent post, “People fear or assume that a factory is…mindless, monotonous, repetitive…” These […]
[…] I’m honored to be a part of this program, a full day of timely topics and engaging speakers. I’ll be talking about the mindsets and management systems from Lean manufacturing that are beneficial in healthcare. We shouldn’t copy methods factories literally, but there are some cultural aspects of great factories that healthcare has been learning from. It’s not about “turning the hospital into a factory.” It’s about using proven management methods to help hospitals be the best hospital they can be. Read a preview of the talk here. […]
[…] CEO of the hospital greeted us and talked about how he has learned from factories (a theme I have written about and spoken […]