Quality Management in a Lean Health Care Environment

Chapter 3

Roof: True North, Sustainment Culture

Lean methodology is by no means the magic wand to improve quality in health care. An organization cannot expect their problems to be magically fixed after taking a few lean seminars, or doing a few rapid improvement events (RIEs) or root cause analyses (RCAs). Lean and other continuous improvement models provide the tools and methodologies that facilitate problem solving and critical thinking, but the tools are not enough to transform an organization.

The culture of the organization must be one of trust and empowerment so that employees are free to identify and solve problems without fear of shame and blame culture. An organization’s culture is just a product of the experiences the employees, leaders, ...