Healthcare improvement isn’t about working harder—it’s about better systems, better leadership, and a culture that supports learning and speaking up. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on Lean healthcare, patient safety, quality improvement, leadership, and continuous improvement. Many of these posts draw on real hospital experiences and lessons from Deming, Toyota, and frontline healthcare teams, with a consistent emphasis on respect for people and learning from mistakes.
The results came fast. A year in, the defect rate was down, the turnaround time was down, teams had A3s on the wall and could talk about them. Then it flattened. Not a collapse. Just nothing more. Somebody says the…
A chapter published recently by Georgia Kyriakeli, a nurse leader at Papageorgiou General Hospital in Greece, makes an argument I wish more hospital executives would hear: leadership itself is a patient safety intervention. Not a background function that influences safety.…
When an organization gets described as having a culture of silence, the usual picture is of employees who won’t speak up. They saw the problem. They kept quiet. Afterward, somebody asks why nobody said anything. Sometimes that’s what happened. But…
On Super Bowl Sunday in February, an 18-month-old boy was pulled from his family’s pool in Gilbert, Arizona, and rushed to Mercy Gilbert Medical Center. He was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. At 11:52 p.m., staff from the medical examiner’s…
I recently recorded an upcoming episode of the Lean Blog Interviews podcast with Dr. Peter Pronovost, the Chief Quality and Clinical Transformation Officer at University Hospitals (UH) in Cleveland. Most people know him because of the ICU checklist that cut…
Emily Swaney, VP of Operational Excellence at OhioHealth, explains how a Lean Promotion Office of 11 people supports a Lean management system for 35,000 associates. The approach relies on developing leaders as problem-solving coaches and on connecting daily huddles and…
There’s a nursing model where one nurse passes medications to every patient on the unit and does nothing else. Another nurse does treatments. An aide does baths and vital signs. Nobody is responsible for a patient. Everybody is responsible for…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
I’m traveling internationally for ten days and I turned on one of the British news channels. There’s a major story about NHS England. First, the awful reality that a nurse would willfully kill babies in the NICU. Then, the second…
In 2006, regulators cited a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin for six violations of state and federal rules after a patient died — three federal, three state. They threatened its license and its Medicare contract. The hospital updated its policies and…
Hospitals have Quiet Rooms now. There’s soft lighting. There’s a chair. There’s a noise machine, which is a machine that makes calming noises. There’s sometimes a succulent in a small white pot. The succulent is doing fine, which makes sense,…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
