|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Refresher for Green Belt and CQE Exams
There will be a refresher course for the Six Sigma Green
Belt and CQE exams. It will cover the statistics sections of
the Body of knowledge and will be given Sunday May 27 9:45
a.m.-12:45 p.m. at the BCIT Burnaby Campus in SE6 room 109.
Cost is $15. Free for ASQ members. Contact Don Mallory at
604 985 0871 for information and registration.
|
May 17 Quality and Business Excellence Program
Improving Patient Flow Through The Regional Acute Care
System for Mental Health & Addiction
|
Keynote Speaker:
|
Sumeet Kumar, BE, MBA, LSS Black
Belt
Lean Coordinator, Vancouver Coastal Health |
Co-Presenter:
|
Dr. Peter Gibson, MD, FRCPC
Medical Director, Richmond Mental Health &
Addictions, VCH
Register |
|
|
Improving Patient Flow Through The Regional Acute Care
System for Mental Health & Addiction
This presentation
will provide an overview of the journey undertaken at Mental
Health & Addiction area across 6 hospitals to address the
issue of Emergency Department decongestion and patient flow
through acute inpatient adult psychiatric units by improving
flow through the system regionally. It will showcase the
process steps during different phases of the project that
enabled the team to move to a model of regional delivery of
care allowing for timely access to acute care beds, regional
utilization standards, and highest standard of evidence
based patient care.
Key take-away for
the participants will include:
a)
An improved understanding of the importance of
setting the right expectations with key stakeholders in the
beginning
b)
How to create and read demand maps that can tell 50%
of the story upfront
c)
How Asking the Right Question makes all the
difference
d)
How to develop one Standard Regional Process that
works for all 6 hospitals
e)
How Communication and Physician engagement were
critical to the success of the initiative
f)
The role of literature search and observations in
developing practical solutions
g)
Effective use of Lean Thinking tools including A3,
Current/Ideal State Maps, Kiazen Bursts, Target Conditions,
Standard Operating Procedure, Leader Standard Work, Visual
Management and Story Board
h)
Role of Lean Management in long term sustenance of the
initiative
|
 |
Sumeet Kumar, BE, MBA, LSS Black Belt
Lean Coordinator, Vancouver Coastal Health
Sumeet has over 16 years of industry experience
spread across Automotive, Fast Food, Chemicals,
Consumer durables, Animal Nutrition products and
Healthcare. He leverages domain expertise,
technology and knowledge on performance excellence
models for stimulating new business growth,
increasing revenues and profits, and decreasing
overhead.
|
|
|
|
|
Being part of the management team, he has held many
senior level positions in his career.
In
his last industry assignment, he served as Vice President &
Deployment Leader, Quality, where he led a team of 17 BlackBelts & 25 Green
Belts and setup infrastructure to drive culture change.
In 2008, one of his
contributions was recognized by Confederation of Indian
Industries, a body promoting Industry Best Practices, for
being instrumental in turning-around a loss making business
unit to a net margin of 8%, increasing revenues by over 70%
and delivering savings of US $3.4 million. At the time, he
served Trident Group as Business Head and was accountable
for Strategic Business Unit’s P&L.
Today, Sumeet’s role
at Vancouver Coastal Health is to lead continuous
improvement projects and spread the culture of LEAN across 6
hospitals in the area of Mental Health & Addiction, for
pursuing Operational Excellence.
|
 |
Dr. Peter Gibson, MD, FRCPC
Medical Director, Richmond Mental Health & Addictions, VCH
Peter’s background is in Community Psychiatry,
working with the challenging population of
individuals with Serious and Persistent Mental
Illnesses. His approach is one of client centered
care with a focus on engagement. |
|
|
He has a longstanding interest in quality and safety and has
participated in and led various committees focused on these
activities. Over the last year, Peter has taken on the role
of Medical Director, Richmond Mental Health and Addictions
within Vancouver Coastal Health and has been involved in a
number of Lean initiatives, encouraging the engagement of
physicians in these activities. |
Don’t forget –
meetings are worth 0.3 RU points towards your
recertification
See who is coming on
LinkedIn
|
Date &
Time: May 17th, 2012 6pm-8:30pm
Register
Location: 370 HSBC Executive Meeting Room at Simon Fraser
University 580 W Hastings St, Vancouver
map
|
|
Quality And Business Excellence Program
Virginia Mason Production System – Lean in Healthcare
Evening Presentation Oct 18th
& All-Day Workshop Oct 19th
|
|
Transforming health care requires a balancing of the
keystones of quality, service, performance, morale and cost.
This is the primary challenge faced by health care
providers, organizations and government agencies across the
globe. How do health care systems provide a high-quality,
cost effective service for patients when they need it, in
the amount they need it, that is appropriate for what they
need to live well?
Virginia Mason Medical Center has been able to face these
challenges through a relentless focus on eliminating the
waste in their health care system. In order to do so, in
2002, they adopted the Toyota Production System as their
management method. The Virginia Mason Production System (VMPS)
places the patient first while pursuing zero defects in
health care. This journey has led to many honors and awards,
including being one of only two Leapfrog Top Hospitals of
the Decade in the United States.
Evening Presentation
Chris Backous, faculty member of the Virginia Mason
Institute and our guest speaker, will outline the history
and the fundamental principles of the Virginia Mason
Production System – including how it was adapted from the
Toyota Production System and the ways in which it is still
evolving today. He will discuss the application of lean
principles to a health care system using real world examples
to illustrate what can be gained from a leaner health care
system. Examples of these gains include lowered costs for
running the hospital, as well as a marked increase in
quality of care and patient safety.
The Virginia Mason Institute (VMI) provides education and
training services to those who seek to join them in
transforming health care. VMI has provided numerous health
care organizations, including those in our province, with
education and training on the benefits of using lean
management to improve quality and service and to decrease
costs by putting the patient first.
The Virginia Mason Institute will be hosting a workshop on
the day after the presentation that will
cover these concepts and their applications in much greater
detail.
|
|
All-Day VMI Workshop
Those attending the Virginia Mason Institute workshop will
learn how to apply the fundamentals of lean tools and
methods to their own work through a combination of lectures
and hands-on process simulations. After attending this
workshop, participants will be able to identify waste within
their current state process flows and to generate ideas for
applying basic lean tools and methods to not only create
dramatic initial improvements to quality, service,
performance and cost but also to keep the momentum going in
order to achieve a sustainable and lasting change.
This workshop will educate participants on basic daily lean
management principles and will give them tools used by a
lean management team to uncover and to exploit opportunities
for improvement. The workshop format is based on a "learn
and do" method where case stories and practical application
will enhance the participant's ability to apply their
learning on their own genba, or place where the work
occurs.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
Q2 2012
Facts versus “the loudest voice in the room” – Pt.1
Insufficient
facts always invite danger.
~ Mr. Spock, Star Trek: Original Series “Space Seed”
|
|
During the last few
Quality and Business Excellence Programs here at ASQ
Vancouver, we have been fortunate to have some excellent
guest speakers. These experts in their field have
discussed the topics of Six Sigma, Lean and relying on
fact-based decisions for our process improvement efforts.
As our favorite pointy-eared Vulcan likes to say, it’s
always best to rely on logic and facts. This is one of
the main reasons that I like the DMAIC process of the Lean
Six Sigma (LSS) methodology.
For those of you
that may be unfamiliar with Lean Six Sigma, very simply, it
is a combination of eliminating waste from the process
(Lean) utilizing fact-based, statistical analysis (Six
Sigma). The goal of Six Sigma is to get to the magical
number of less than 3.4 defects per every million
opportunities. Needless to say, this is a stretch goal
for most organizations!
In terms of DMAIC,
the acronym stands for the 5 steps in this methodology:
Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. This allows
teams to logically (there’s that word again) work their way
through a process improvement effort from beginning to end
and ensures that they are not moving ahead before covering
all their bases. Each step is very important and
should never be skipped or rushed. Let’s take a brief look
at each phase.
‘Define’ involves
exactly what it says: Defining the problem you need to fix.
While this sounds easy, it’s often the most difficult, but
most crucial, component. This is the start of where
emotion and “the loudest voice” can derail a project before
it’s even started. We’ve all been in the meetings
where someone will say: “This is our problem, let’s fix it!
Alright, everyone go fix it…Move, move, move!” Well, we need
to really understand the problem first to be able to tackle
it quickly, accurately and to ensure we are actually fixing
the
right problem! Have we quantified the problem
properly? And no, saying “it happens all the time”, is
not quantifying it. When did the problem start?
What’s it at now? What was it at before? What do you
want it to get to? In addition, it is crucial to do a
Voice of the Customer and a Voice of the Business analysis.
We want to make sure that we are aligning our improvement
efforts with the goals of the business and what will fix the
pain points our customers are feeling.
This reminds me of a
discussion our team had at the start of a recent potential
LSS project. The sponsor had indicated customers were
not able to get through to their dept. when calling on the
telephone. Customers were said to be always
complaining about this issue and the solution, the sponsor
said, was to just get a new phone system (aside from already
providing the “solution” before starting the project – a big
no-no, the phone system would be a multimillion dollar
investment). After discussions, it was determined that
a Voice of the Customer analysis had not been done – it was
all based on “feel” and anecdotal feedback. A quick
survey of customers was then done and it was revealed that
the customers had no issue with the time it took to answer
the call, but did have issue with the long time it seemed
for the clerks to resolve their problem. This often
delayed payment when reducing payment turnaround was a
strategic business goal for the year. If time
had not been taken to look at the facts, we would never have
aligned this project with both customer and business
needs…and potentially wasted a lot of money on an
unnecessary replacement phone system and actually improved
very little.
‘Measure’ is simply
gathering reliable data to understand the current state.
This is where that focus on facts and data really shines –
it cuts out the noise of assumptions and suppositions.
Also, one of key word here is reliable – the data
should be dependable and repeatable (preferably hourly,
daily or weekly). If the data is not reliable or
easily available, the project will be more difficult to
manage and take longer. In the Measure phase, you
definitely will be looking to map out the current process,
usually as a Value Stream Map. Here is where you’re
going to be working on Key Process Output Variables (KPOVs)
and do some Capability Analysis. Another important
part of Measure is the development of Operational
Definitions – these are clear and specific definitions of
our measurements. These are key to ensuring that
everyone is one the same page and agrees that we are
measuring what we say we are measuring (ie: everyone might
have a different idea of what a “return” is).
In one project, I
got to see the benefit of fact-based decision making in the
Measure phase. This was accomplished by seeing how data can
be used to disprove assumptions just as easily as
prove assumptions. In this case, we were looking
at returned product and the team members from one region
felt that another region “always” had the most returns and
were the sole reason why the overall return rate was so
high. Well, it turns out that we had some really solid
data (that the team agreed was valid) as it could be pulled
daily and in great detail. We ran some statistical
analysis and were able to show that not only was that region
not the worst but they actually had the lowest return rate!
In fact, the region the team members were from was actually
the one with the highest returns! Needless to say, the team
was impressed by the way we were able to disprove this
assumption and it saved us from going after something that
wasn’t really impacting our project. In addition, we
went to this region to see what best practices could be
shared and gained more benefit from the project!
Next quarter, we’ll
continue with our look at Analyze, Improve and Control as we
dig deeper into fact-based decision making.
|
|
|
|
|
|
  
Supported by
Sponsored by
Jobs
Quality Assurance
Manager
QC Technician
Quality Assurance
Manager
ASQ Vancouver is a member of
|
|
