Reorganising a Service Department: Central Patient Transportation
This paper provides an analysis of the operations at the service department ‘Central Patient Transportation’ at the University Hospital Gasthuisberg, Leuven, Belgium. This analysis generates several suggestions for improvement. The recommendations are based upon observations, questionnaires, in-depth interviews and analysis of historical data. The perception of long waiting times (for transportation) both in the medical examination departments and in the nursing departments results in a need for improvement (and even reengineering) of the service department. On the one hand, some problems are situated in people management. The number of operators (currently 77) seems to be insufficient to handle the growing number of requests for transportation (currently more than 1200 transports per day on average). Moreover the rate of absenteeism among operators is relatively high, and supervision is very difficult due to the lack of an appropriate control mechanism. On the other hand, some organisational and infrastructural problems are identified. The planning process may be improved. For example, the ‘pick to light’ system to transport the patients from the medical department to the nursing units seems outdated. Furthermore, the high failure rate of the elevators causes major disturbances in the transportation process.. There is an urgent need for restructuring the transportation services. A fundamental reengineering of the process has been suggested, namely a partial decentralisation of the transportation services. After implementation of partial decentralisation, many of the above mentioned problems seem to be solved. The quality perception of the transportation service and therefore the overall quality perception of the university hospital has increased.
Business process reengineering service department patient transportation decentralisation
Kobe NAESENS Ludo GELDERS Daniel DE COSTER Christine VAN ROMPUY
Centre for Industrial Management KU-Leuven,Leuven,Belgium University Hospital Gasthuisberg,Leuven,Belgium
国际会议
北京
英文
2007-05-30（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）