Classification of Waste in Hospitals

Abstract

Hospitals have to focus their efforts on identifying and eliminating waste of all forms if they are to succeed in today’s competitive landscape. A recent study by the Murphy Leadership Institute (Murphy, 2003) concluded that wasteful work consumes more than 35% of hospital employees’ time. This wasteful work includes activities such as completing multiple forms for the same task, filing inefficient shift-to-shift departmental reports, waiting for medications, and searching for misplaced records. Jimmerson warns that the actual amount of waste in health care lies closer to 60% (Panchek, 2003). In this chapter, we briefly review principles of lean philosophy for improving performance and then ..