Lean Healthcare Exchange asked this question: “Is 99.9% Good Enough in Healthcare?” To me it is an intriguing one, because when you talk of healthcare, you are dealing with people’s lives. So I asked, Is Six Sigma Even Good Enough in Healthcare?
I agree with what the post over at LHE implies: that 99.9% is not good enough. Despite the human factor, there should be no room for error or defect in healthcare. This was emphasized in one of their care provider orientations.
One of our slides asks if we can promise 100% reliability with the following: no patient misidentifications, no medication errors, no wrong patient, site/side surgery, no unnecessary tests/treatments and no sponges left inside patients. In a group of the usual 20 or so orientees, there are at least a couple who are certain that we cannot promise those things 100% of the time, even though we have robust, standardized processes to prevent each one of these potential errors.
Last week, one of the country’s headliners was the death of 25 infants in Ospital ng Makati (Hospital of Makati), caused by neonatal sepsis. Some of the known causes of neonatal sepsis are high-risk deliveries like premature births or teenage pregnancies, lack of prenatal care, dirty or unclean delivery area and facilities such as incubators.
I’m sure the hospital has been careful about infections in their environment. It was just not thorough enough or the system in place has not made provisions to have a zero defect.
As the post says:
It would not be very comforting if we expected that ventilator to operate correctly only 99.9% of the time, especially if we didn�t know when the 0.10% (or 86 seconds/day) might happen.
So…they are to remember, �Process, process, process.� Learn the process and follow the process, without diversion, without workarounds, every patient, every time, and we can prevent errors.
One good thing about Six Sigma is that it’s more than just 99.9% because it primarily deals with the tools for achieving 3.4 DPMOs, and sustain it.
*Photo from Stock.Xchng
