Question 12

2

Control

There are different measures that need to be deployed so that it can lead to improvement of the current processes. Currently the process improvement needs to be brought in from the perspective of reducing the time wastage, drawing time optimization schedule of the nurss and addressing ways to ensure doctor availability during the peak hours and emergency situations. To ensure improvement, the performance of time schedule of the doctors needs to be monitored over a duration of 3 months based on which further improvements can be suggested (Gupta et al., 2020). There is also a need to understand how the time usage can be optimized and the patient satisfaction level can be improved. The patient may be asked to fill a feedback form so that their expectations from the hospital could be understood and it could help understand if the requirements were met or not. To reduce the product wastage, the recycled products need to be used which would help maintain a high level of service with respect to the patients and the doctors.

Document the improved process

The improved process has been designed in such a way that the impact would be seen on the doctors, nurses and patients. The improved process includes developing a highly optimized work time schedule for the doctors based on which the doctors would be able to optimize their time schedule (Gupta et al., 2020). This would ensure that not only the working for the doctors be optimized, it would also play an important role in allowing the patients to be served better. The doctors would be allowed to work on double shift hours so that with the current resources, the requirements of the patients could be fulfilled.

The improved process has been defined in such a way that the doctors as well as the nurses would be allowed to work together so that the time schedule of the doctors is arranged in such a way that in case there are surgeries that clash in time, they could be aligned across different doctors based on the seniority level of the doctors. This also becomes important in ensuring that the doctors are able to work as per their own schedule while working with the patients as per the requirements.

To cater to the patients during peak hours, there would be contractual doctors who would be kept on stand by duty. This would help ensure that the patients and the doctors would be able to work during the peak hours without having to lose any of the patients. This also becomes important from the perspective of the safety of the patients.

Continuously improve the process

The current process that has been deployed needs to be continuously improved. This is so because it would other wise become difficult for the hospital to ensure that the required level of efficiency is obtained and the doctors are able to work as per the required level (Niñerola et al., 2020). To improve the process, the regular performance of the doctors along with the patient satisfaction level need to be tracked. This needs to be carried out on a three monthly basis so that it can help understand if the doctors are working well and if the doctors are able to meet the demand of the patient.

The patient satisfaction score can be deployed to understand if the patients are being treated well and if all the concerns of the patients have been addressed. This plays an important role in ensuring that the doctors are able to improve the working condition of the doctors as well as the patients. This could be helpful for the hospital in general and would ensure that more number of colonoscopy could be performed. At the same time, it could also be helpful in ensuring that the overall health care conditions could be improved and the error rate could be reduced. The improvement in the error rate is because of the potential impact of different processes along with focus on the measures because of which the processes could be further improved.

Closing thoughts

For the colonoscopy process improvement project, it is required that the wastage be reduced and patient satisfaction level be improved. This requires the development of a DMAIC process that can be used to understand if the project improvements can be observed. It can also be seen that for improving the satisfaction level, improvement in terms of the efficiency of the doctors along with other processes is required. It would play an important role in ensuring that overall process improvement could be observed. This would also help reduce the error rate.