SIX SIGMA QUALITY

Implementation of Six Sigma Quality in hospitals to decrease medical errors

Implementation of Six Sigma Quality in hospitals to decrease medical errors

Introduction

Lean and Lean Six Sigma applications in healthcare require an understanding of how the tools and methodologies translate to the people-intensive processes of patient care. Once applied, the possibilities are endless. When a healthcare defect occurs, the product is unsuitable for consumption and waste is generated. While this waste may be recycled within the healthcare system, there will be some embodied energy loss and additionally there may be some degradation of the material. By eliminating defects in healthcare, and Six Sigma is one of the methods that can be used to accomplish this goal, materials and energy can be used more effectively.

There is a rich history of quality management methods, and the culture of Six Sigma has grown out of approaches such as total quality management, zero defect, and quality control. What differentiates Six Sigma from previous quality management approaches is that it focuses on defined projects with specific objectives, with an emphasis on creating a human resource infrastructure within the hospital of Six Sigma black belts and green belts to lead these projects.

Discussion

Six Sigma is a strategy used within the hospital to manage quality. It is applied across many sectors. It aims to reduce the amount of defects that occur in products. By reducing this variability in the output of produced items, cost can be reduced or profit increased. Defect elimination is an inherently sustainable goal, as defective products result in wasted resources, wasted energy, and wasted labor. While Six Sigma has now entered the common language in certain hospital and healthcare circles, Six Sigma is registered by Motorola, Inc., as a trademark (Karr, 2011). Originally implemented by Motorola as a statistically based way of improving the defect rate in the healthcare of electronic devices, Six Sigma has now become widely recognized throughout a variety of industry sectors.

Manufactured products have specifications that must be met in order for the product to be considered functional and useful. A product needs to fulfill a number of criteria that can often be defined numerically; for example, a nut needs a certain internal diameter and thread in order to securely fix onto a bolt. In statistics, if the mean represents the desired specification and the nearest specification limit can be defined as six standard deviations from the mean, then virtually all manufactured products will fit within this spectrum of quality and be considered acceptable (Bigelow, Wolkowski, Baskin & Gorko, 2010). Any quality management approach assumes that a cultural change can be achieved within the hospital and commitment to achieving quality management can be gained from employees at all levels of the hospital including top management. Six Sigma and Sustainability In order to work toward improving the sustainability of healthcare operations, it is critical that energy and materials be conserved.

Six Sigma also seeks to integrate statistics and quantitative data into the process to ensure that the outputs are measurable, quantifiable, and verifiable, rather ...