Contact: Phyllis Levine at 845.896.6934 X3001 or by Email
HVTDC Training Helping Benedictine Hospital Nurses Spend More Time With Patients
Kingston and Fishkill, New York, October 28, 2007 – To increase the time nurses spend with individual patients in their rooms, Benedictine Hospital in Kingston brought in the expertise of the Hudson Valley Technology Development Center (HVTDC) in Fishkill, to train nurses in Lean Operations’ famous Kaizen program. Kathy Guido, RN, BSN, MBA, Vice President of Patient Services at Benedictine Hospital states, “On average, one nurse will walk 8 miles throughout just one small unit of our hospital during just one 12 hour shift. We want to reduce the amount of time she or he spends finding equipment, getting medications from the pharmacy, moving from room to room, answering phones to spending more time at our patients’ bedsides. We wanted to improve the amount of time nurses spend with patients, and thanks to HVTDC’s training we are already achieving that goal.”
Specializing in helping businesses streamline daily procedures through Lean 101 training, HVTDC is helping medical facilities, manufacturing firms, small to medium-sized businesses work more efficiently and profitably. Between September 24 and 28th, the not-for-profit business resource center provided Lean 101-Kaizen training to nurses in Benedictine’s 25-bed Cardiac Step Down Unit. Dave Tooker, HVTDC Business Development Engineer, and Erika Choi, Principle of Choice Solutions, worked with seven members of the Benedictine nursing staff to determine what steps in the nurses’ daily activities could be streamlined or eliminated to allow them to spend more time with patients. “On average, our nurses” explained Guido, “spend 27% of each day directly at the patients’ bedsides. We want our nurses to spend at least 50% of their time at patients’ bedsides, and we believe we can reach that goal with HVTDC’s guidance.”
Since 2006, HVTDC has worked with Benedictine in several areas of the hospital including the chemotherapy and ER Fast Track divisions. Through training in HVTDC’s Lean Chemotherapy Project, that division reduced the time they sent an invoice to an insurance company to the date it was paid by the insurance company from 49 days down to 14 days. The efficiency training the ER Fast Track team received from HVTDC’s nationally recognized perspectives on Lean Operations resulted in that team effectively treating patients at an unprecedented average time of 60 to 65 minutes per patient.
During the time that the HVTDC team initially observed nurses working in Benedictine’s Cardiac Step Down Unit, the unit that treats patients transferred “down” from the Cardiac Critical Care Unit for observation and monitoring, they saw many challenges the nurses faced to being with patients. Nurses were seen doing many duties that could potentially be delegated to other staff members. “Other delays to being with patients that were observed,” states HVTDC’s Tooker, “ran the gamut from nurses searching to find available blood pressure machines to navigating hallways with equipment to assisting other nurses’ patients.”
To help the staff, HVTDC introduced Kaizen training that means to continually improve. “The Japanese philosophy of Kaizen,” states Tooker, “equates to taking things apart, examining them, and then making them new by reconstructing them in a different way. Our goal was to help the nurses examine actions they took every day, find ways to eliminate wasteful steps and actions, then create thoughtful acts to strive for continuous improvement.” During their training, the Benedictine nurses were asked to identify problem areas or areas of wasteful actions or steps. They were trained to ask why certain steps were taken, then figure out ways to fix problem areas and/or eliminate waste, then find solutions that would solve any recognized problems.
Recommendations made by the nursing team for improving problem areas include eliminating all interruptions of nurses except by physicians and for emergency situations, installation of an automated unit answering system with one phone line dedicated to calls from patients’ family members only. The team also suggested use of mobile carts to carry everything a nurse needs to care for a patient including a computer, medications, and supplies. “We’ve already experienced some results from HVTDC’s training that are quite positive,” reports Guido. “Patients are more satisfied with the care they are receiving, nurses are more satisfied with the demands of their jobs, there is improved safety in the hallways, and there’s a decrease in noise during the night time hours. Cost savings include reduction of nurses’ overtime hours and improved flow of patients in and out of the unit.”
HVTDC is one of ten regional technology development centers funded cooperatively through the NYS Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR), and the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST). For information on the Hudson Valley Technology Development Center contact Phyllis Levine at 845-896-6934 x 3001, via email at phyllis.levine@hvtdc.org, or visit www.hvtdc.org.