Six Sigma
The Son Dureta experience
Healthcare has no room for inefficiencies. Public healthcare managers, especially for hospitals, have to provide an increasing volume of high-level healthcare services with limited resources.
The quality of delivered services is not only to do with the users’ perceptions, but also with clinic and business metrics. In this environment, processes improvement is the name of the game.
What changes in processes should be made to maximise the impact in our key quality metrics? What are the factors to be controlled to ensure our processes meet specifications? Somebody tries to fix a problem by subcontracting a guru who then applies similar solutions to those problems that have already remedied problems in another, similar organisation. This can prove faulty, if the problem is about a complex organisation, complex process and a complex environment, as in a hospital. If you do not want to try solving a problem by serendipity, you must apply a method based on facts, but ‘your’ facts.
Six Sigma is a robust, rigorous methodology to reduce defects. Based on measured data, analysed by statistics, it is facts driven. However, some organisations have found Six Sigma difficult to implement. It was perceived as a hermetic art, understood only by the initiated. If your colleagues do not call you Master Black Belt, you probably do not understand what Six Sigma means. In organisations such as this, Six Sigma and quality relates to the quality department.
Other companies claim big earnings due to Six Sigma. These are the ones that think the quest for quality in an organisation is not just a matter for the quality department or methodology knowledge. They believe the search for excellence involves everyone - starting with the management. Change acceptance is the Holy Grail for quality. People need to perceive the necessity of change and be committed to change. Only after gain, and people’s acceptance of change, can you apply quality methodology.
This is the vision for Son Dureta Hospital, a 900-bed public hospital in the Balearic Islands, which has a new Board of Directors devoted to healthcare quality and interested in new management methods. The hospital is involved in implementing Six Sigma and change facilitation methodologies learnt not from a consultant company, but from a partner who is using it in his own business.
Carles Ricci Voltas BSc (econ) MHM, is CEO at the 900-bed Son Dureta Hospital, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. He is the first in Europe to implement a method called ‘Six Sigma’ as a hospital quality model and reports that he is ‘migrating his hospital to the PPP managing model’.
As former CEO for Fundacion Hospital Manacor, he introduced a new financing public model to Spain. As Consultancy Director for the Instituto Gallego de Medicina Tecnica he helped healthcare institutions in Spain and South America in strategy and business development, organisational change management and technology assessment.
01.03.2006
