Going Lean: Health and the Toyota Way

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the third programme in the series, Dr Kevin Fong explores the concept of ‘lean’ in healthcare. He visits Toyota’s largest car assembly plant in the United States and discovers how the company’s legendary management philosophy – the Toyota Production System – is being implemented in hospitals, in an effort to improve patient care. Toyota’s philosophy of continuous improvement aims to increase quality and flow whilst decreasing cost. But whilst this may work well for the mass production of cars, can it really improve the care of individual patients?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:03.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use,
0:07.0	go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. broadcasts.
0:22.0	The Japanese Automotive Giant Toyota is the most successful car manufacturer in the world, but its largest assembly plant is not in Japan. It's here in
0:26.2	Georgetown, Kentucky where the formidable assembly line that surrounds me produces over
0:31.0	half a million cars a year for the US domestic market.
0:35.0	It's a 24 hour a day operation and like every aspect of this business
0:40.0	it's underpins by the Toyota production system, an almost mythic business model founded
0:45.6	by Taichiano which espouses the mantra of continuous improvements or Kaizen.
0:52.1	Business gurus in a wide range of industries have attempted to
0:55.0	emulate the success of the Toyota production system. But it's not just
0:58.7	commercial manufacturing organizations who are interested in understanding the Toyota way.
1:04.3	More recently, the health sector has attempted to import these concepts in the search for greater
1:08.8	efficiency.
1:09.8	I'm Dr Kevin Fong and in this program in our series The Truth About Success and Failure in Medicine
1:17.2	I'll be asking if this is the right approach for health care and if doctors and nurses
1:21.6	really can learn lessons from the production line.
1:25.0	One of the first things students of the Toyota Way tell you is that if you really want to understand something, you've got to go and see it for yourself.
1:35.5	This is what the Japanese call Gen-Cenbutu.
1:39.0	I'm Mike Trebes. I'm an External Affairs Specialist, Toyota North America.
1:46.6	So it's pretty fast, we're like headed down what looks to me to be, if it were outdoors,
1:51.0	a fairly major road. What are we passing at the moment?
	...

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