The Nun and the Bureaucrat/Good News...How Hospitals Heal Themselves Book/DVD Set

In The Nun and the Bureaucrat/Good News...How Hospitals Heal Themselves book and documentary video, the people at two large hospital systems explain how lean management methods adopted from Toyota cut costs while improving care and staff morale -- without outside funds or government help. This remarkable book/DVD set describes how doctors, nurses, and administrators at SSM Health Care (the Nun) and the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative (the Bureaucrat) adapted concepts and tools from the Toyota Production System to recognize and eliminate nonvalue-creating steps in processes. They tackled the complexity of hospitals with a systems thinking approach of viewing and transforming organizations as a whole rather than as a collection of separate parts or departments. What these hospital personnel gained from Toyota, write authors Louis M. Savary and Clare Crawford-Mason, was the knowledge, training, and scientific tools to develop teams of people who could become greater than the sum of their parts, work together more effectively and efficiently, continually improve the processes involved in their jobs, and see how their individual work contributes to the aim of the whole system. The 272-page book and one-hour DVD set is designed and priced to be used as a resource at all levels of healthcare organizations, companies, schools, or government agencies. The set was developed to help people see work with what one leader called new eyes. Rather than focusing on solving the problems of the individual parts of an organization, management and employees in The Nun and the Bureaucrat/Good News... set learned how to focus on creating a cooperative environment in which people pursued continuous improvement of processes, the larger system, and themselves.