You should write an assignment with no more than 3,500 words
(Assignment 1)
Please advise on improving the hospital’s ultrasound service. The service is available to all patients in the hospital, as long as the patient is either mobile enough to come to the ultrasound room or is brought there by a porter or nurse. The service employs six technicians, a receptionist and a manager. There is no appointment system. Patients are seen in the order in which they arrive at the ultrasound room. They must wait in line for this and some patients complain about the limited amount of seating. Similarly, staff members including nurses complain about needing to spend their valuable time waiting for the service when they escort patients. Staff members wait in line with other patients. Furthermore, staff members complain that some of the more challenging patients, such as some psychiatric patients, cannot be seen by the service, because they cannot be brought to the ultrasound room. All technicians and the manager work 9am to 5pm. The receptionist works 7:30am to 3:30pm. Neither the manager nor the receptionist are clinically trained and they don’t undertake imaging work. At night, there is no ultrasound cover. The service is particularly busy in the morning, when patients are asked to present before consultations, and again in the late afternoon, when the doctors have finished their ward rounds and made recommendations for imaging. In- between, the technicians find themselves with spare time, often for several hours. They use this for daily team meetings. Every technician has his/her own system of stock keeping, and during the last audit, it was discovered that stock regularly goes out of date and has to be discarded. Examine ideas for improving the quality of the ultrasound service. Provide specific recommendations.
Note:
Prepare a report using Lean Thinking (as one bigger theory) and then several tools within it and advise on performance improvements for a specific operations issue.
Use Harvard system referencing.
You can use assumptions to cover some details which have not been covered in the scenario.
