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Are Hospitals Not Getting Any Closer to Having “Just Cultures?”

For a long time, I've been an advocate for the parallels between Lean and an approach called "Just Culture." See previous blog posts on this topic. Here's a good overview of Just Culture, which says, in part:

"A just culture recognizes that individual practitioners should not be held accountable for system failings over which they have no control. A just culture also recognizes that many individual or active errors represent predictable interactions between human operators and the system in which they work.

However, in contrast to a culture that touts no blame as its governing principle, a just culture does not tolerate conscious disregard of clear risks to patients or gross misconduct, such as falsifying a record, performing professional duties while intoxicated, etc."

Dean Gruner on ThedaCare’s Lean Journey: Lessons, Missteps, and Leadership Reflections

My guest for Episode #286 is Dean Gruner, MD, the recently retired CEO of ThedaCare, a health system in Wisconsin that has long been considered a worldwide leader in the practice of Lean in healthcare. See this article about his retirement, where he says "I've gotten more than I've given."

Dean was previously my guest in Episodes 119 and 144 and I'm thrilled that he took time out of his retirement to talk with me about his lessons learned as he looks back on how ThedaCare's Lean journey has evolved, including some things he would consider to be missteps and challenges that they used as a springboard to get even better.

I will also be releasing a separate episode where Dean talks about their experiences with Accountable Care Organizations (our topic from #144) and other "big picture" healthcare issues of the day.

I'm including a full transcript along with a three-page PDF summary, as I've been doing recently.

Book Review: The Work of Management

In today's post, Jason Morin, from XPO Logistics, writes a review of Jim Lancaster's recent book "The Work of Management," published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. Jim Lancaster is CEO of Lantech and the book tells the story of their Lean journey and their evolution over time.

Not All Improvement Ideas Require “Projects”

In this post, I share some thoughts and build upon one of the presentations at last week's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, where, Tim Pehrson, a regional CEO for Intermountain Healthcare, talked about how they piloted a continuous improvement process in one region... and how they're now spreading it throughout the system. This leads to confusion, in online discussion, about terms like projects, suggestions, ideas, and such...

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