Mark Graban's "Lean for Haiti"

Today's blog entry features a special note from Mark Graban, author of the book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction and founder and lead contributor of LeanBlog.org:

January 12 marked the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January of 2010.

Last year, I was fortunate to meet a special person -- Russell Maroni, an x-ray tech at Akron Children's Hospital. He volunteered in Haiti for 15 days in February 2010 as part of the earthquake relief efforts. He was unexpectedly, and necessarily, pressed into service in a medical role, not only caring for patients, but also using his formal lean training from ACH to help improve processes and radiology patient throughput at a field hospital.

Russell wrote a very compelling, and very personal, journal during his time in Haiti. He and his colleagues took many pictures. We are sharing this all in a PDF eBook that we are freely distributing - to share the story and to create awareness for Haiti relief needs. We are asking people who read the book to consider donating to the Friends of the Orphans, which runs an orphanage in Haiti.

The journal isn't mainly a 'lean story,' although it does include his hand-drawn A3 plan. It's a very personal story, of his own prayer and contemplation of the trip, and his experiences in the midst of that tragedy.

To read more, go to the Lean for Haiti site, which has links to the PDF and other social media sites for the relief effort.

Alaskan Lean

I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick Anderson -- the director of Chugachmiut (a Tribal consortium created to promote self-determination to the seven Native communities of the Chugach Region of Alaska) -- at the recent TWI Summit in Las Vegas. He told me about his organization and its Lean initiatives -- in fact, they are detailed right on the Chugachmiut site.

While perusing the site, I noticed a link to Patrick's engaging blog and perused some of the entries including this recent post about a kaizen event in the human resources department. In addition, Patrick participated in a podcast on the Lean Blog site hosted by Mark Graban in which he discusses applying Lean principles to healthcare delivery in Alaska.