Continuous Improvement

Toyota Motor Corporation developed the Toyota Production System (TPS), which is based on the philosophy of achieving the complete elimination of waste in pursuit of the most efficient methods. Several health organisations have implemented the model to redesign “lean” clinical and administrative processes, eliminate waste and improve quality, thereby achieving outcome improvements, patient safety and cost reduction. More often, when the leader who championed the project left the organisation, it could not continue with the improvements. A success story of continuous improvement (CI) comes from St. Mary's General Hospital in Kitchener, Ontario. For three consecutive years, this hospital gained the reputation of being one of the three safest hospitals in Canada ( Chandrasekaran & Toussaint, 2019 ). But six years before this, its ranking dropped due to unusually high levels of sentinel events such as patient falls.