Dr. John Grout’s Mistake-Proofing / Poka Yoke Workshop sponsored by the Georgia Tech Lean Consortium and Berry College’s Campbell School of Business was a great success.
An audience of 44 soaked up the insights and principles of mistake-proofing presented by Dr. John Grout on Tues. July 20 at Berry College. There were 8 consortium member companies, 4 guest manufacturers and 2 healthcare organizations respresented.
Each attendee found a mistake-proofing or failsafing device from Dr. Grout’s collection at their seat. During introductions, each attendee had to figure out and explain their device. Reviewing these examples, plus Dr. Grout’s explanations, was a good way to learn about many different devices and techniques.
John’s most recent focus has been applying mistake-proofing to medical processes. Mistakes are always costly, but in healthcare the consequences can be particularly devastating. The medical practice greatly depends high levels of skill, training and a high degree of personal accountability. But we in industry know that “pay more attention” or “more training” are unacceptable corrective action responses. The same should apply to healthcare practice. Mistakes will be made no matter what levels of training, skill, expertise and conscientiousness.
John used a new presentation technique called Percha Kucha – a 20 slide presentation allowing only 20 seconds per slide for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds – to give us an introduction to mistake-proofing. Do an internet search on the term for more information.
We then learned the mistake-proofing vocabulary. The last topic was using A3 for mistake-proofing and root cause analysis.
Dr. Grout is Dean of the Campbell School of Business, and an international expert/researcher/writer on Mistake-proofing. His most recent work, Mistake-Proofing the Design of Health Care Processes is available free of charge. Go to his web site www.mistakeproofing.com From this page, you can follow the links to download a pdf version, and/or request a paperback copy.
For more information:
www.mistakeproofing.com
david.apple@innovate.gatech.edu
