Lean Implementation in Rawdat Al-Khail Health Center

Abstract

Due to the significant increment of the State of Qatar Population in the Last few years, enormous pressure are puts on the current health care centers across the country. Health care is one of the main pillars of the future vision of Qatar 2030. Therefore, a revision of the current system of the country’s health care system is highly appreciated. In this project, one of Qatar’s busiest health care centers is studied to enhance the workflow of the patients. The walk-in patients are the most unpredictable, and hence, the project is focusing on improving the current walk-in patients’ flow in the health care center. The Lean Thinking approach is utilized to achieve this enhancement to the system. The Value Stream Mapping (VSM) tools are the used tool to accomplish this goal. After mapping the current process of the patients, the non-value-added activities are identified, and improvement ideas are suggested in order to reduce the waiting time of the walk-in patients of Rawdat Al-Khail Health Center. Cost-reduction is also achieved using the recommended approach of organizing the work activities. The improvements in the lead time (LT) and process time (PT) were mainly in the administrative steps of the current workflow since the other actions are not controllable, where a reduction of 8.8% in LT and 9.3% in PT were achieved. Suggestions and recommendations were made to Rawdat Al-Khail Health Center, which are applicable to other health centers in the State of Qatar. Further improvements to the other sectors of the Health Care are going to be addressed in the future in order to achieve a larger enhancement to the entire system.