International journal of health care quality assurance
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Increasingly, healthcare providers are implementing lean practices to achieve quality results. Implementing lean healthcare practices is unique compared to manufacturing and other service industries. The purpose of this paper is to present a model that identifies and defines the lean implementation key success factors in healthcare organisations. ⋯ Healthcare managers are adopting business practices that improve efficiency and productivity while ensuring their healthcare mission and guaranteeing that customer values are achieved. Shared understanding about complex goals (e.g. reducing waste and enhancing customer value) at the front-end is crucial for implementing successful lean practices. In particular, this study shows that nursing practices, which are both labour intensive and technology enabled, are good candidates for lean practice.
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Admission to and transfer from an intensive care unit affects not only the patient but also his or her relatives. The authors aimed to investigate relatives' perceptions of quality of care during a patient's transfer process from an intensive care unit to a general ward. ⋯ The findings have important implications for nursing and nursing management. A relative's perception of the quality of care before and after transfer from ICU may be a valuable source to evaluate the ICU transitional care.
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Int J Health Care Qual Assur · Jan 2014
ReviewQuality of care and health professional burnout: narrative literature review.
Quality of care and health professional burnout are important issues in their own right, however, relatively few studies have examined both. The purpose of this paper is to explore quality of care and health professional burnout in hospital settings. ⋯ The narrative literature review suggests that weak retention rates, high turnover, heavy workloads, low staffing levels and/or staffing shortages conspire to create a difficult working environment for health professionals, one in which they may struggle to provide high-quality care and which may also contribute to health professional burnout. The review demonstrates that health workforce planning concerns, such as these, impact on health professional burnout and on the ability of health professionals to deliver quality care. The review also demonstrates that most of the published papers published between 2000 and 2013 addressing health professional burnout and quality of care were nursing focused.
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Int J Health Care Qual Assur · Jan 2014
Multicenter StudySaudi Arabian ICU safety culture and nurses' attitudes.
The purpose of this paper is to examine nurses' attitudes towards safety culture in six Saudi Arabian intensive care units (ICUs). ⋯ To the knowledge, this is the first study to use SAQ to examine nurses' safety culture attitudes in Saudi Arabian ICUs. The present findings provide a baseline and further details about Saudi Arabian ICU safety. Study participants represented nine nationalities, indicating the nursing workforce's diversity, which is expected to continue in the future. Such a nursing cultural heterogeneity calls for further studies to examine and evaluate attitudes and values to improve ICU safety culture.
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Int J Health Care Qual Assur · Jan 2014
Improving operating room productivity via parallel anesthesia processing.
Parallel processing of regional anesthesia may improve operating room (OR) efficiency in patients undergoes upper extremity surgical procedures. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether performing regional anesthesia outside the OR in parallel increases total cases per day, improve efficiency and productivity. ⋯ Simulation modeling can be an effective tool to show practice change effects at a system-wide level.