Healthcare Kaizen : Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements

This Shingo Prize-winning book focuses on daily continuous improvement, or Kaizen, for healthcare professionals and organizations. It shares some mechanics for facilitating Kaizen, but more importantly covers the management mindsets and philosophies required to make Kaizen work effectively in a department or as an organization-wide program. All of the examples are real healthcare examples shared by Franciscan Alliance Health System and other leading organizations, with many color pictures and illustrations of Kaizens. This book will be helpful to healthcare organizations that have embraced weeklong improvement events, but now want to move beyond just doing events into a more complete Lean management system.

Healthcare Kaizen focuses on the principles and methods of daily continuous improvement, or Kaizen, for healthcare professionals and organizations. Kaizen is a Japanese word that means "change for the better," as popularized by Masaaki Imai in his 1986 book Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success and through the books of Norman Bodek, both of whom contributed introductory material for this book.

Winner of a 2013 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award!

In 1989, Dr. Donald M. Berwick, founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, endorsed the principles of Kaizen in the New England Journal of Medicine, describing it as "the continuous search for opportunities for all processes to get better." This book shows how to make this goal a reality.

All of the examples in the book were shared by leading healthcare organizations, with over 200 full-color pictures and visual illustrations of Kaizen-based improvements that were initiated by nurses, physicians, housekeepers, senior executives and other staff members at all levels.

It’s often said, without much reflection, that people hate change. The experiences shared in this book prove that people actually love change when they are fully engaged in the process, get to make improvements that improve patient care and make their day less frustrating, and when they don’t fear being laid off as a result of their improvements.