Advanced Operations Management (AOM)
December 19, 2021
Environmental Degradation – Reaction Paper
December 19, 2021Executive Summary
The use of Six Sigma Methodology has been important for my current field of improvement in performance, with advancement in my current skills to set a higher and better level of function. I have focused on Providing Care for Kids in a Hospital, an environmental challenged centre by the need to continuously work on the improvement of performance and to meet the different regulatory standards. The main focus is on focusing the Six Sigma improvement process with the higher level of strategic improvement opportunities when it concerns healthcare. It is important to focus on Continuous Quality Improvement tools and methods which are set at the core of the accountabilities at the time of facilitating a team through the improvement of the project. The mapping is mainly to measure the effectiveness and demonstrate the Six Sigma Green Belt training to help in the advancement of the skills with the ability to learn the strategic and high-level improvement projects.
Introduction
Quality management has been effective for improving and achieving better results and so for this, my major goal has been the welfare of the customers. The experience provided with the effective learning of the methodology as well as properly using the tools helps me in leading a Six Sigma team. The major goal of Providing Care for Children in Hospital is to adapt to the different demands of the customers in a globalised market with the focus on handling statistical quality control, zero effects and the TQM. This is mainly based on matching with the higher and better quality management initiatives. The focus is mainly on the involvement of both the individual and the team activities in an effective manner to work towards the improvement of service and production in a better manner (Antony et al., 2017). The Franciscan Children’s Hospital, a hospital in Brighton, Massachusetts, specializing in caring for children with special needs in the field of health, recently completed a project using the DMAIC methodology to improve the effectiveness of the dental office.
Problem Identified and System to be improved
The learning environment has been about handling the implementation of guiding a step-by-step application of knowledge with a focus on the dental healthcare project. The experience is mainly evaluated and performed under a planned activity. The empowering organizations tend to make sound with some better data-driven decisions. Here, the statistical sigma level tends to measure the targeted services which come with a proper quality goal. Along with this, the demonstration is about the process to perform at a level of execution by meeting the specifications in a range of 3.4 defects per million opportunities. Six Sigma is supported mainly by the methodology of Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC method) (Benitez et al., 2007). The problems which were identified at the hospital were mainly to offer the different medical and educational services which include the dental services for the services for special needs. Along with this, there is a need to focus on the efforts where the dental surgeries could be ignored as much as possible. As per the analysis and the studies to assess the capability, the focus is on the capability of completing 12 surgeries in a day, but it had only 8 surgeries. The goal was mainly to increase the capacity of the operating rooms.
The improvement could be through Six Sigma with the ability to process and make data-driven decisions that could help operate the room efficiently and enable doctors to check more kids (De Mast et al., 2012). The focus can also be on promoting integrity by helping the child reach his potential. Along with this, the use of the DMAIC approach could help in team involvement with staff representatives from the nursing, scheduling, registration and the departments of anesthesiology with developed process maps using Quality Companion. The process maps will help in properly handling and understanding the current process through scheduling, registration and surgery preparation. They are also able to handle the factors affecting different processes mainly narrowing down the internal and the external contributors to cancellations (Dreachslin & Lee, 2007).
Current Level of performance
The Six Sigma approach is mainly about the production or handling the services which are based on different specifications. The focus is on the steps of the process where there is a need to define the learning.
Define: the focus is on how the customers can process and set priorities to meet improvement in their projects. With this, there is a need to set the expectations of the improvement through articulation based on customer requirements. The facilitation is generated through critical to quality (CTQs) from those who have the best knowledge of the process. The assessment is through the voice of customers (VOC) focusing on how the current process tends to improve or change the process.
Measure: The phase is mainly to define and detect the procedures which are going in the team and how they are going to be measured. For this, a proper data collection plan is developed with a measurement system to make sure of the process. The phrase tends to focus on customer specifications with measuring the meaningful data for the project. The data collection goals and operations are mainly identified through sampling plan strategy which is then compared to an improved state of the process (Kumar et al., 2008).
Analyze: The process uses the data to gather the measurement phase to achieve the desired outcome. Here, the focus is on recognizing the few important variances which could be responsible to have an impact on the process. The phase is crucial as it tends to utilize the data mainly to identify the important causes of the defects along with using the team to understand the cause and effect relationships in the process.
Control: The control process could help learn the lessons that can be shared with others from the project and reproduced too. The important phrase is to handle the time with handling the ability to determine the process capability and control. The process owner needs to trust the improvement which is in place, recognize the goals that have been set and improve them under validated form. The statistical control is to allow one to never act to the data without understanding the expected variations or any unexpected variations that are set under a special cause (Lakhiani et al., 2017).
The improvement could be through meeting or exceeding the improvement goals where the identification is to handle the resources with ensuring the cause of variation with working out of the equation. The improvement helps in managing the design of the experiment with the process that can be used to test out all the valid and relevant conclusions.
Here, there is a need to focus on how the team can prioritize the factors for the investigation by directing attention to the variable analysis that the hospital can control. The engagement of the staff with their deep involvement has also been helpful to understand the current process and the improvements (Li & Al-Refaie, 2008).
The use of the above graph has been for the cancellations which helped the hospital to properly focus on the issues and the reasons for daily cancellations.
The graph above shows the procedure time and the time that was allocated for the same. The time seems to be exceeding the scheduled time where the longer procedures are seen to finish earlier than the time they were scheduled for. Hence, unused time is becoming a major ineffective part for the hospital (Lynch et al., 2003). There is a need to focus and investigate the data with the project team, staff and the management to discuss the statistical standards with properly checking the breakdowns that have been occurring for the same. Along with this, the Improve phase where the staff members are affected needs to be understood to check why the change is seen to be happening. The team members did a more in-depth analysis so they can understand the factors which led to the time that was not used, in the operating rooms. Along with this, there is a focus on how the used histograms are effective to analyze the turnaround time for procedures, noting any significant change or variation with the average turnaround. This is mainly to allow more time to work on the procedures (Nilakantasrinivasan & Nair, 2005).
Root Cause of the problem
The major issue with the process was the management where the technologies were not used properly. The requirement of health care for the children is increasing day-by-day and hospitals need to increase their staff and functioning by more operating rooms that could help them operate or do surgeries in time. Recognizing the possibility of developing a key service sector, the team selected efforts to improve the quality of the hospital approach in the dental department, which did not perform dental operations most effectively. A note was prepared for analysis, and studies conducted to assess the ability of the previous facility were able to complete 12 operations per day, but the daily rate is currently only 8.7 operations. The goal of the hospital team is to perform 12 operations per day. There is a need to improve the capacity of the dental operating rooms with the significant reduction in the attendance fluctuation which was found to be a major issue (Roberts et al., 2017). Along with this, the established performance metrics could help in measuring a better long-term use to work on customer satisfaction and cost-saving. The issues were also that some regular patients who tried to get the surgeries done tend to wait for the complete day even after the appointment, but could not get proper results. Customer retention was also one of the major problems faced by the organization.
Improvement in the process performance
With the analysis of the current performance, the team tried to focus on the development of process change which is related to the test of effectiveness on child care. They tend to complete the current state and the future state Value Stream Maps in Quality Companion to identify the opportunities for improving the leading time and then work on executing the new and learning process (Shokri & Shokri, 2017). Here, the improvement also worked where there was a jump from 8.7 to 9.9 to 11.2 control phase for the average surgeries in a day. The day-to-day utilization rates also got stabilized where one could help the team to establish better performance metrics to improve operating room capacity and make an improvement to the utilization rates. There is a need to focus on monitoring for any unusual variations in the different number of surgeries that tend to happen in a day.
The value process map clearly shows the cycle time with the daily scheduling, registration and admission of the children. Along with this, the cycle time spent in the operations and the first-in-first-out technique helped the hospital to grow in a better manner.
For example, a hospital team collects data and develops a Pareto chart to analyze the causes of cancellation. Pareto analysis helped to identify the cause more often and helped them understand how daily revocation affects schedules and overall session scheduling.
The graphs of individual values in Minitab show the real-time distribution of the procedure originally set for each action group and time (Sokovic et al., 2010). The researchers found that shorter procedures tend to skip the specified time, while longer procedures tend to end earlier than planned. Graphs of panel rates allow them to quickly visualize the amount of time that is used every day of the event in each operating room. The members of the subsequent analysis group (the “analysis” phase) to understand other factors that contribute to unused time in operational and position were used to analyze recurring response periods given large changes in time. They realized that both the variance and the mean change could be reduced to increase the time for these actions. Analyzing data and additional information on factors that negatively affect operations, the team can develop practical changes, and then check the effectiveness of improvements (the current and future status of the data stream). Supplementary flow maps were added to identify opportunities for improving latency, and then begin the implementation of new and smaller operations (Starbird, 2002).
The roadmap for improving operations and key business measures is simple and understandable in the aggregate of these five steps. DMAIC is an iterative process that provides a structure and guidance for improving processes and productivity in the workplace. Project managers and Sigma specialists apply DMAIC steps and related analysis tools at each stage to analyze and improve the company’s key indicators. Measures are being created, differences are studied, operations are reduced, and operations are improved (Tong et al., 2004). The result is improved performance, fewer errors and greater efficiency and productivity.
Recommendations
The focus can mainly be on handling the new policies which are streamlined by the scheduling process for the dentists, with diminishing the amount of unused operating room time. A regular update by keeping the dentists apprised of the updates of patient booking and improvement in the registration process can help the hospital in functioning in a proper manner, highlighting the time-sensitivity factor as well. The organization can also make use of the cost-benefit analysis with piloting the proposed solutions to properly assess the effects of full-scale implementation. This is a slow process but would be effective too. Technology like barcode scanning to match the medications for the patients, as well as other types of automated medication dispensing units, could help in improving medication safety. The best practices are could be proper hand hygiene and major advice to the parents so that parents can strictly guide their children to wash their hands before eating anything. This will eventually prevent the spread of infection as well and ensure the adoption of the right solutions to engage the staff, patients and families to understand the full scope of the changes on the different categories of people.
Conclusion
With the Six Sigma methodology based on the DMAIC process, the focus is mainly on experiencing the statistical and change acceleration process (CAP) tools. The experiences have been challenging for the facilitation tools to the best structure to work on improving the project goals (Yaduvanshi & Sharma, 2017). The major focus can also be on the CQI model that could work on healthy and improving the use of measurements and statistics in the practice of dental healthcare. The learning experience is mainly gained through the formal classroom training with the applications in the above case. The focus is mainly to understand the appreciation for the methodology used to enrich the participation with the development of the educational component. The organization has been completely dedicated to focusing on the needs and the quality care of the children with special needs. Here, the focus is also on data-driven performance improvement efforts to improve safety and increase the efficiency of the system.
References
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