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.
In 2009, I wrote about a nurses’ union in New Brunswick that supported Lean because they realized this methodology could help reduce waiting times and improve working conditions. It’s win Yet, as part of the recent politicized Lean healthcare brew-ha-ha in…
The price paid for most management consulting work is based on either a daily rate or some variation of a flat-rate fee based on what is being delivered. Enterprise software pricing is also often fixed. In both cases, the client…
What Henry Ford wrote about hospitals in 1922 sounds surprisingly modern. He argued for reducing nurses’ wasted motion, designing around patients, standardizing rooms, challenging professional hierarchy, and treating every process as experimental. More than a century later, many of those…
TL;DR: Lean thinking teaches us not to blame individuals for mistakes that are caused by broken systems. In healthcare, this mindset aligns closely with Just Culture and patient safety principles: human error is inevitable, fear makes performance worse, and real…
Since the healthcare improvement work I do is apolitical and non-partisan, I’m generally not one to butt into the political affairs of Canada or other countries. But, when I hear complaints about Lean or when it’s being called a “scam”…
After some supporters of the Saskatchewan Lean healthcare efforts reached out to me, I’ve been trying to follow everything that’s being said and written – which is hard to do (just try a Google news search). There are many facets to…
Listen My guest for episode 196 is Jim Huntzinger, founder of Lean Frontiers. Today, we’re talking about the Training Within Industry methodology and his new website WhatIsTWI.com. We are discussing topics including what a typical TWI “journey” looks like for…
Thanks to a Google News Alert email, I get news stories (on a daily basis) about hospital layoffs around the country. Many of the articles feature an executive making a reassuring sounding comment along the lines of: “Although we have…
This week is National Patient Safety Awareness Week. See my thoughts on this from 2012. Every week should be National Patient Safety IMPROVEMENT Week, as the problem is that dire. But, it’s great to try to bring to light the…
As National Patient Safety Awareness Week continues, thanks go to Graham Foster for sending me this article from the UK: Most NHS staff deem care ‘fit for their own family’. Well, that’s a positive, happy sounding headline. “Most” think the care…
Retired Navy F-14 pilot and airline captain Steve “Monty” Montague spends his non-flying days helping hospitals adopt the safety culture that made commercial aviation the safest way to travel. In this episode, we talk about why standardized work frees people…
I hope you’ll consider coming to the 5th annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, being held in Los Angeles, June 4th and 5th, 2014. The Summit is sponsored by the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value and the Lean Enterprise Institute. It’s…
