FED UP WITH LEAN

That’s it, I can’t read another article about lean management in the healthcare system.

It is the flavour of the month. Just a few years ago I attended several days of training sponsored by the province and presented by the Health Quality Council.

Presenters from the United States touted their methods as the best, most efficient way to deliver service to the “customer.” I remember a surgeon once telling me the reason to call a patient a customer is that it’s easier to bring a customer down to a bottom line.

Now, we as taxpayers are funding an American consultant to teach, and many members of our health-care providers to learn lean.

The Saskatoon Health Region is paying a day’s wage to employees to take this training.

Meanwhile, people continue to wait for surgery, our frail elderly receive less care than they need to remain in their homes, or they wait months to get a nursing home bed. Patients are sent home without adequate planning and return the next day, only to die within a day of re-admission. How is lean making a difference to them?

How can we equate providing care to the sick to building an inanimate object such as a car? And is Toyota really doing such a good job? Its production may be lean, but there was yet another recall of its vehicles recently.

The title of this effort to “lean” health care may give us a hint: lean management. Maybe we should emulate IBM, when it restructured: Lean from the top down. Joan Neufeldt Saskatoon