Well-Known Business Efficiency Model Aids Life Safety: Lean Six Sigma tag-teams with traditional healthcare fire protection efforts
Source: Healthcare Life Safety Compliance – January 2010
By: Scott Wallask
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Lean Six Sigma tag-teams with traditional healthcare fire protection efforts
Those of you who have heard of the Lean Six Sigma approach to business operations efficiency may be surprised to know there are related applications to fire safety in healthcare facilities.
Ron Wince, president and CEO of Guidon Performance Solutions in Mesa, AZ, has used Lean Six Sigma to improve physical safety, fire protection, and emergency planning in hospitals. Guidon is a business management consulting firm.
For example, managers at one of Guidon’s client facilities were interested in reconfiguring the layout of their cancer treatment floor. In reviewing floor plans and walking the unit, Wince discovered the following life safety concerns:
- Oxygen cylinder racks stored in corridors and which clinicians often ran into
- Fire sprinkler system valves with outdated labels that didn’t keep up with revised fire codes
- Unused beds stored in front of elevator and stair doors
“People developed a habit of leaving [the beds] there over and over again” until it became an accepted practice, Wince says.
However, an outsider bringing these concerns to the table raised awareness within the hospital of the problems, he adds.
Together, Wince and facility managers found better—and, by Life Safety Code® standards, more appropriate—ways to store the beds and cylinder rack, and they relabeled the valves.
Keeping items close by
In practical terms for healthcare safety, Wince says, Lean Six Sigma asks this question: Are items located in the best possible way to make them available?
For example, must staff members walk a long distance to reach an item? Do they have to look for items? Are items and signs mislabeled?
“If it is unsafe, it can’t be efficient,” Wince says. “So you ask, ‘Does that make sense that it’s stored there?’ Sometimes a lightbulb comes on.”
Another way to view Lean Six Sigma is in terms of identifying defects that raise life safety risks, says Jay Arthur, a Lean Six Sigma consultant at KnowWare International, Inc., in Denver.
“False fire alarms are a defect,” Arthur says, adding that eliminating potential risks to using flammable reagents in a hospital laboratory may be another area that Lean Six Sigma could tackle.
Generally, safety and facility directors want to immediately remove a safety concern from the environment, but that tack isn’t always convenient for clinical staff members. For example, moving a cylinder storage rack out of the corridor may make it more difficult for nurses to get to it quickly. Lean Six Sigma looks at ways to compromise without negatively affecting safety rules, Wince says.
It is inaccurate to think—yet commonly assumed—that Lean Six Sigma is simply a fancy substitute for a facility director’s own eyes and ears in noticing safety concerns, Arthur says.
Safety-related problems that are infrequent or subtle may not be easily detectable by observation. Lean Six Sigma can provide extra tools that better identify patterns and variations, Arthur says.
Your knowledge can bolster process upturns
When Lean Six Sigma improvement teams visit facilities—events that at times last four to five days—the ultimate goal is process enhancement.
Wince always asks for facility safety representatives to be on hand during the visits because they are familiar with associated regulations.
Facility directors and safety officers can pitch their expertise to administrators in similar ways if process improvement or other large projects are under way at a facility.
“You use the people who are familiar with the codes,” Wince says.
For example, when trying to relocate the aforementioned cylinder rack, improvement team members initially thought to stick it in an alcove off of a corridor that also contained emergency oxygen shutoff valves.
It was a safety officer at the hospital who correctly noted that storing the rack in the alcove would block access to the shutoff valves in the event of an emergency because staff members would have a difficult time quickly removing the rack.
As it turned out, the cylinder rack was rarely full, so in the end, the hospital obtained a smaller rack, found an appropriate spot out of the corridor to store it, and then bolted it to the wall.
Consistency reflects Lean Six Sigma
In aiming for standardization across all processes, Lean Six Sigma would promote the idea that oxygen cylinder racks should be in the same spot on each floor or unit, Wince says. In reality, however, floor layouts are different on various units.
As middle ground, “if people could put oxygen [cylinders] in the same room on each floor … that’s a great thing,” Wince says.
If that occurred, facility directors would be comfortable knowing cylinders and racks are out of egress corridors, and nurses would automatically know where to look for cylinders.
By the same token, during new construction or renovation, it is better to install medical gas shutoff valves in the same locations on all units, Wince says.
Within the Lean Six Sigma world, doing so increases efficiency, and from an emergency planning perspective, it is safer to locate the valves in consistent spots.
All contents © 2010 Healthcare Life Safety Complience All Rights Reserved.
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