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Cathy Thwing: Applying Lean thinking to health care
In her varied career at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, Cathy Thwing, MBA, RN, has worked as a transitional nursery and neonatal intensive care unit staff nurse, a nursing supervisor, float team patient care manager, and now as director of access and system support. That adds up to years of accumulated wisdom on patient care processes.
Now her wealth of experience is being leveraged in a new way. Thwing is the
first nurse at Children’s to complete training as a “Lean” fellow. Lean processes emphasize eliminating all types of waste and any activity that does not add value for customers. Lean thinking is being applied to health care as a way to standardize processes and improve efficiency.
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Lean training focuses on waste reduction, standardized work, managing change, mistake-proofing, and quality. In addition, it uses a rapid process improvement method that offers a fast and effective way to design and implement changes.
Last year, Thwing and a multi-disciplinary team including representatives from nursing, medicine, pharmacy, and materials management, used the Lean method to develop a system-wide prototype for code cart organization and stocking. “The concern was that our code carts were not standardized, resulting in excessive search time for supplies during a code. There were also inefficiencies in stocking the carts,” says Thwing.
The code cart team worked for 4 ½ days to assess the problem, devise solutions and present a final report summarizing their recommendations to be implemented later this year. “The biggest take-away is how much we accomplished in a short time,” says Thwing. “What’s most exciting for me is to work with front-line staff and improve processes in a way that is meaningful for them.”
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