In the Lean community (and in businesses and hospitals, as well), people often talk about “fire fighting” in a colloquial way. Today, my guest for episode #278 of the podcast is an actual professional fire fighter, Tom Bouthillet (@tbouthillet on Twitter). He serves as Fire Captain / Paramedic for the Hilton Head Island Fire Rescue where he is the Cardiac Care Program Manager (STEMI and CARES Site Coordinator).
In this episode, we discuss the role of Lean and process improvement in fire departments and EMS, why blame is “completely ineffective” as a strategy, why “unsafe supervision” is a problem (and what that means), and why it's necessary to build in quality instead of just inspecting for quality.
Streaming Player (Run Time 50:58)
For a link to this episode, refer people to www.leanblog.org/278.
Topics and Links for this Episode:
- Tell us about your professional background and career
- What are the duties of a “fire captain?”
- How did you get exposed to Lean and process improvement?
- What does Lean mean to you, EMS professionals, and fire fighters? What are the benefits to them, to the public?
- How are checklists used?
- Last week, I tweeted about a hospital lab not being willing to add a new test because it would increase their budget even though it would reduce cost for the hospital overall… silo thinking (can't blame them for managing their budget, this is a system design issue)
- You raised a more disturbing scenario involving EMS taking a patient to the hospital with a suspected STEMI heart attack… a scenario when a cardiologist might refuse to bring a patient back to the cath lab… can you explain this? Why would this happen?
- Links with Tom's work:
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Podcast Summary
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Mark's new book is The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation.
He is also the author of Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, the Shingo Award-winning books Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen, and the anthology Practicing Lean.
Mark is also a Senior Advisor to the technology company KaiNexus.