Abstract
Recent challenges brought by the coronavirus disease-2019 pandemic have underscored the importance of coping with pressures on the workforce in healthcare around the world and have emphasised the continuing need to improve quality and operation efficiency of healthcare services even in such dire circumstances. Over the years, lean thinking has gained recognition in the healthcare industry, where lean has been associated with benefits, such as improved healthcare delivery quality, reduced costs and increased effectiveness of the healthcare delivery processes. Lean thinking has also been analysed in human resources with benefits, such as increased job satisfaction and perceived job autonomy. The current narrative review was planned to analyse and discuss the application and implementation of lean strategies with a particular focus on human resource management in healthcare. The review is complemented by a case study in a private healthcare group in Turkey, aiming to demonstrate in practice the effect of lean strategies on the satisfaction of patients and relatives, the job satisfaction of the employees, and the level of turnover rates within healthcare enterprises.
Highlights
Recent challenges brought by the coronavirus disease-2019 pandemic have underscored the importance of coping with pressures on the workforce in healthcare around the world and have emphasised the continuing need to improve quality and operation efficiency of healthcare services even in such dire circumstances
Recent challenges in the wake of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have exposed the weaknesses of healthcare supply chains across the world, resulting in a significant pressure on the delivery of health services and on its workforce [1]
Going forward, lean thinking will continue to be a tool for healthcare managers in putting in place processes and procedures to improve the quality and operational efficiency of healthcare services and productivity of its workforce from a human resources (HR) management perspective [1]
Summary
Lean Thinking: Lean manufacturing practices were first developed in Japan by Ohno, Toyota’s top executive, in response to the scarcity of Japanese resources and economic constraints in the 1950s and is often seen as the key to Toyota’s becoming of the industry leader in terms of product quality and profitability [5]. Lean has been developed as a production-oriented concept and tool that provides managers with a. The underpinning notion of the lean approach or lean thinking is the concept of continuous improvement in performance and productivity based on quality products and services and in the elimination of waste [2, 4, 15]. Companies across sectors have transformed their production systems over time by adopting the lean strategy [16]. Based on this idea, lean transformation provides for eliminating all kinds of activities that do not create value in the organisation
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