Mejora en el tiempo de atención al paciente en una unidad de urgencias gineco-obstétricas mediante la aplicación de Lean Manufacturing

Abstract

Abstract Introduction. This paper introduces a proposal to improve the time of attention for patients, by means of the Lean Manufacturing methodology, in a gyneco-obstetrics emergency unit located in Bogota, in which the patients have to wait for a long time and this fact goes against law 237, 2008, produced by the Colombian Senate. Objective. Develop an improvement proposal for the attention time, by the use of the Lean Manufacturing methodology, in the gyneco-obstetrics emergency unit of the ABC Clinic. Materials and methods. A field work was developed during six months, in which, by the use of Lean Manufacturing tools such as the value stream mapping and the spaghetti diagram and a study of times on a representative sample of patients, the areas and processes that do not add value to those patients were identified and, then, action plans to improve the attention times were generated. Results. The applicability of the proposal was assessed by means of simulations based on the Arena software, demonstrating improvements in the attention times of up to 56%. Conclusion. This project demonstrates the applicability of Lean Manufacturing and its main tools in clinics or hospital in Bogota, contributing to establish what processes must be improved or eliminated in order to reduce the attention time for the patients.