Leveraging Kaizen to Achieve Continuous Improvement
Learning Objectives:
- Describe Kaizen and how it can help you execute improvement work
- Recognize the role that staff empowerment plays in sustaining improvement
Too often in healthcare we make an improvement, only to see behaviors and performance revert back to pre-improvement levels as time moves on. What are the causes of this? Why is so much time and energy put into the change, but not into the sustainment? Previously my colleague, Dr. Mark Parker, detailed the Model for Improvement, the framework to structure improvement in a goal driven way. Today, I would like to build off of that and explore Kaizen, a key driver within Lean management to execute and sustain improvement. One of the central components of Lean methodology, Kaizen is simply translated from Japanese as “change for the better.”1
