PBS Documentary: Improving Hospitals

Topic: Management Improvement
Clare Crawford-Mason and Llyod Dobyns have teamed up on a new documentary.  Previously they created If Japan Can-Why Can't We? and the Deming Library Tapes.

Good News - How Hospitals Heal Themselves
A One-Hour Documentary Airing on Public Television Spring/Summer 2006
Reported by Former NBC Anchor Lloyd Dobyns

This rare good news documentary reports on a surprising solution to escalating costs, unnecessary deaths and waste in America's hospitals. Doctors and nurses tell how they did their best, working overtime, while hospital conditions worsened. They were delighted to learn a new way to improve patient care dramatically and reduce unnecessary deaths, suffering, errors, infections and costs without additional resources or government regulations.

A patient is not an automobile, but...
The unlikely solution was to use Toyota management principles (systems thinking, lean thinking, TPS) to improve their hospitals. Systems thinking allows leaders and staff to see the complex, modern workplace with "new eyes" and turn problems into improvements. It has saved up to 50 percent in costs, thousands of lives, and avoided hundreds of thousands of medical errors. Significant improvements have already begun in hospitals in several major cities.

A companion how-to book, The Nun and the Bureaucrat-How They Found an Unlikely Cure for America's Sick Hospitals: an excerpt is available from management wisdom.com (you can also order a video or dvd of the program). "If you think that hospital care cannot be significantly improved in quality and cost, you have another think coming. Read this book." - Russell Ackoff
To read more about this announcement, please click on the link: PBS Documentary: Improving Hospitals