Factory lessons put to use at Seattle Children's hospital
Submitted by seachange on Tue, 2010-08-10 04:36.
Julie Weed, New York Times, August 1, 2010 Two years ago, the supply system at Seattle Children's hospital was so unreliable that Susanne Matthews, a nurse in the intensive-care unit, would stockpile stuff - catheters in the closet, surgical dressings in patients' dresser drawers and clamps in the nurse's office. And she wasn't the only one. "Nurses get very anxious when we can't get our hands on the tools we need for our patients," Matthews says, "so we grabbed them when we saw them, and stashed them away." This, in turn, made the shortages more acute. ... Factory
Assembly Lines Kill
It's precisely this factory approach - the just-in-time delivery, the bare-bones staffing, the assembly-line healthcare system - that kills 98,000 patients per year in US acute-care hospitals. Invented in the US and exported to Japan following WWII, we now have Toyotas that reportedly kill people and hospitals that do too. - Sandy Eaton, RN