Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction

You get what you expect and you deserve what you tolerate.

Our own attitude is that we are charged with discovering the best way of doing everything.

Lean is about the total elimination of waste and showing respect for people.

In the lean approach, companies are taught that prices are set by the market and that one way to improve profit margin is to reduce costs. This thinking flies in the face of "cost plus" thinking, where we look first at our own costs and set prices based on our desired profit margin. The reality is that most companies whether manufacturers or hospitals, do not have market power to set prices as they wish.

Gwendolyn Galsworth writes that the purpose of visual management is to reduce "information deficits" in the workplace. She writes that "In an information-scarce workplace, people ask lots of questions, and lots of the same questions, repeatedly- or they make stuff up.