ABSTRACT
Virginia Mason Medical Center is one of three major hospitals in Seattle with a staff of more than 500 employed physicians and a total of more than 5,500 employees. The head of the Kaizen Promotion Office (KPO) of Virginia Mason at the time, Linda Hebish, attended a workshop given by the Training Within Industry Institute at an Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) conference in San Diego in June 2008. A week before going into any area, people would go over the schedule with the charge nurse, being respectful of the unit's unique situation and looking for bits of downtime. The initial training rollout was completed on schedule in nine weeks. In early 2016, Baptist Health Care, a not-for-profit integrated health care system with three hospitals, four medical parks, and a behavioral health network centered in Pensacola, Florida, was experiencing high infection rates related to central lines, with the Surgical Intensive Nursing Unit (SINU) showing the highest rate.
