Since the Health System restructuring was announced in November, I’ve gotten a lot of questions concerning whether we are going to continue to explore and implement the Lean system of management.
Clarity on this is important because Lean is a system for process improvement—and having such a system is vital to any organization of UTMB’s size, depth and breadth.
The Lean process has involved many hours of classroom work where leaders came together to learn about Lean, share thoughts, pinpoint problems and explore solutions, etc. That also included weekly Gemba walks, workplace walkthroughs aimed at identifying potential areas for improvement. (Gemba is the Japanese term for “actual place.')
One thing moving forward as we look at various alternatives to Lean is we aren’t going to have folks come in for multiple hours for classwork or going through Gembas.
That’s not to say that Lean—or the concept behind it—is dead. Rather than focusing specifically on Lean, we now are focusing more simply and broadly on process improvement.
UTMB is dedicated to developing its leaders and evolving its management approach to improve the culture of the organization and manager/employee relationships. Doing so keeps us on our path of progress, growth and continual improvement of patient experience and outcomes.
Lean was one resource available to that end. It strengthened us as a leadership team and gave us best practices on which to build. While some specific strategies that we used with Lean are no longer being deployed, your leaders will continue to build on those best practices and engage you accordingly. Our commitment to process improvement, to growing strong leaders and managers to our staff and to our patients, remains strong.
Sincerely,
Dr. Gulshan Sharma
Senior vice president, chief medical & clinical innovation officer