Rotherham General Hospital provides a wide range of health services to the people of Rotherham and to an increasing number of patients from further afield. The hospital aims to build a healthier future for patients, their carers and families, and their staff. The hospital’s Emergency Department deals with around 75,000 patients per year, but demand frequently exceeds capacity, resulting in long waiting times. The Chief Executive has recently ordered a review of productivity and efficiency in the department and a multi-disciplinary team has been formed to gather information prior to running a Kaizen event._x000D_
The team decided to gather information about cycle times, waiting times, and any other relevant information by following a number of ‘tracer’ patients through the department on a busy Friday evening, when waiting times tend to be at their very worst. One of these patients was Andy, a 16-year-old high school student who arrived at the ED with a suspected leg fracture._x000D_
Take a look at the case study below and the pre-prepared worksheet on which details of Andy’s journey have been recorded by the person who observed it. Once you are familiar with the case study:_x000D_
* Use this information to create a Value Stream Map that will enable everyone who participates in the upcoming Kaizen event to visualise Andy’s journey. Make sure that the map clearly shows the total lead time, cycle times, task times and waiting times._x000D_
* Once your map is ready, imagine you are now participating in a Kaizen event. Use your learning from this module to identify the main bottleneck (or bottlenecks) in Andy’s journey. For each bottleneck, suggest what you believe is the constraint (or constraints) causing it. You should find the concept of the Eight Lean Wastes that we studied in Section 4 of this module is very helpful for identifying constraints throughout Andy’s journey. You should feel free to mark-up or annotate your value stream map with all the constraints and wastes that you can identify._x000D_
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Resources:_x000D_
Case Study – Emergency Room Waiting Times at Rotherham General Hospital_x000D_
Document Tagging Worksheet – Orthopaedic Patient in Rotherham ER