Patient safety doesn’t improve through punishment, vigilance posters, or telling people to “be more careful.” It improves when leaders design safer systems, support speaking up, and focus on learning instead of blame. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on patient safety through a Lean lens—exploring medical errors, near misses, psychological safety, leadership behaviors, and how healthcare organizations can reduce harm by fixing systems rather than blaming individuals.
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Sometimes you just need to get a team together and improve. Here’s a good example of use of A3 thinking to improve opioid prescribing in outpatient rheumatology. Reducing harm requires the conditions to speak up, raise…
The other day, I stumbled across an old article that I remember, as it was published in the Wall Street Journal in 2004. The WSJ normally has a paywall, but this article is old enough that it’s free to the…
Joining me for episode #354 of the podcast is Kim Hollon, the CEO and President of Signature Healthcare, based in Brockton, Massachusetts. I first met Kim about a decade ago and, as we discover during the podcast discussion, one of…
Kim Hollon is CEO and President at Signature Healthcare. I don’t know him well, but I’ve heard a lot of great things about him and his leadership from a friend who used to do Lean work at Signature. I did…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Does Lean “work” in hospitals in the US? Sort of, according to the Journal of Healthcare Management. There is evidence that Lean improves efficiency and financial performance, but little evidence to support improvements in patient…
Today, I’d like to celebrate my friends at Mary Greeley Medical Center in Iowa for being one of six healthcare organizations to receive the 2019 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Read more in this news story or this press release.…
Joining me for Episode #352 of the podcast is Frederick Southwick, M.D. He is a Professor of Medicine and is also Director of Patient Care Quality and Safety in the Division of Hospitalist Medicine at the University of Florida in…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients “Imagine walking into a restaurant and being seated. Sometime after your meal, you receive the check and find an additional charge that was not indicated on the menu or previously mentioned by your waiter.…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients If you set a target without providing a clear path on how you want it achieved, and then punish staff when they fail to achieve it, then staff will achieve the target – by any means necessary and…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Transformation and quality improvement is rarely sustained without changing management behaviours and management systems. John Toussaint writes about the challenges of adopting lean management systems in the NHS in “Is quality a strategy or an operation?”.…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Globally, at least 5 patients die every minute due to unsafe care. For Patient Safety Week, the World Health Organization is calling for urgent action to reduce patient harm in healthcare. On this theme, Manitoba discloses…
TL;DR: A hospital president explains how Lean healthcare leadership, Respect for People, and Just Culture help engage frontline staff, reduce blame, and improve patient care. This article made me smile the other day — especially the comments about Lean, front-line…
