RGH Video Blog – The Six Sigma Role of Organizations
Hello and welcome to the Global Health Video Class. My name is Dr. Elvira Beracochea and I am the president and CEO of Realizing Global Health. You can find us at http://www.realizingglobalhealth.com. We are a global health consultant company working to create self-reliant, sustainable health systems.
I hope that you have been enjoying this Six Sigma series—because it is really my passion! When I see how well it works, and it works because it is epidemiology-based, patient-centered, and evidenced-based. You can’t go wrong with those three principles. Today, we are going to talk about how governments, how foundations and organizations working in global health can adapt Six Sigma. They have to follow the three principles I just mentioned and then apply these tools:
- Leadership – There has to be policies that say this is what is going to be done, this is how it is going to be done in this country. If there isn’t a nutrition policy, if there isn’t an HIV/AIDS policy, or a maternal health policy, then now is the time to review it because that sets the background for everything that we are going to do. It is the foundation for how we are going to improve global health and how we are going to implement it in that country to make sure that improvement is accelerated.
- Assessment – When we assess the situation, we look at how that country is really delivering health services. We look at the map and look how people are coordinated and look at which areas are not being covered. Coverage and mapping of the resources is very important in the assessment stage.
- Measurement – We measure how well each component is performing. We look for areas where the rates of immunization are lower, for example, or where rates of treatment compliance are lower. We look at those differences and we look at ways those places that are high performing can help the places that are not performing as well.
- Diagnosis – We use all of this information to diagnose what are the most important procedures, what are the most important steps that need to happen so that every patient receives quality healthcare. This may mean changing standard operating procedures, job descriptions, supervision checklists, work routines, patient flow, etc. Everything is improved in a way that we meet a higher standard—less than 3.4 errors per 1 million opportunities.
- Implementation/Improvement – Next, we look at how we can implement those new steps and procedures that will allow us to really make sure that what we said was going to happen actually happens and that we can predict health outcomes. Health outcomes have to be predictable up to a certain stage. Of course, there are always individual variations because patients come in with different conditions. But it is important that we are able to predict on a large scale how well we are going to do. If we say we are going to cover 95% of the children then we need to make sure that we are going to do that. We need to make sure those procedures that will immunize 95% or more of the children are really going to work.
I hope that you are thinking about how you can implement these tools. Then control and make sure we prevent those errors from happening again by continuously reinforcing, supporting, and encouraging the health providers to provide always the best and follow the procedures we have determined. It may seem a bit complicated but actually it is not. It is really so comforting to have something that works and actually delivers results in a predictable way. So think about Six Sigma and how you can apply it in your own country. Think how your foundation or organization can help bring that to more countries and more places- to more hospitals and more clinics. If we consistently bring six sigma to every health facility, to every hospital, then we will be able to make a big impact and really realize global health.
See you next time when we will continue exploring Six Sigma in global health!
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