Lean Six Sigma Leadership in Health Care Organizations

The reason for choosing this topic was the want to change the current employee settings in health care organizations. Using Lean Six Sigma Leadership has been a proven method to increasing staff satisfaction and empowering lifelong learning. The research for Lean Six Sigma ideologies came from reputable sources of literature, actual Lean Six Sigma training, and other publications. The want for providing information on the benefits of using this leadership program comes from future problems in health care administrators communicating to clinical staff and other employee bases. The findings were significant enough to create a compelling argument for the benefits of entire program in health care organization settings

Enhancing Knowledge Management Strategies

{Excerpt} Despite worldwide attention to strategic planning, the notion of strategic practice is surprisingly new. To draw a strategy is relatively easy but to execute it is difficult—strategy is both a macro and a micro phenomenon that depends on synchronization. One should systematically review, evaluate, prioritize, sequence, manage, redirect, and if necessary even cancel strategic initiatives

Building knowledge for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander remote tourism: lessons from comparable tourism initiatives around the world

This report aims to build knowledge about what issues Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people may need to consider in remote tourism by reviewing, compiling and drawing insights from comparable tourism initiatives around the world.The report is based on information from a range of sources that highlight remote tourism issues at many different levels of strategy and development , from the micro level of ensuring engagement with local service providers, to the broad level of collaboration strategies with diverse interest groups. The examples identify a wealth of remote tourism roles available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, demonstrating that remote tourism is complicated and people should examine which roles are appropriate and achievable.The report covers the main remote area landscape settings: remote arid and semi-arid areas (deserts), remote rainforests, remote high altitude mountainous areas, and remote cold and warm water islands. Each section discusses a collection of cases and other tourism initiatives by people s indigenous to the respective remote landscape settings. Many cases illustrate the desires of people around the world to preserve natural and cultural qualities while sharing remote areas through tourism. Summaries from each case identify issues that progressively build further insight into the challenges and strategies people from around the world have applied to remote tourism.A limitation of the report is that the review provides a snapshot of remote tourism activity throughout the world; it has not been able to say which of these activities are sustainable. Nevertheless, this approach uncovers the gravity of challenges faced by Indigenous peoples around the world involved in remote tourism, with the common dependence on external sources particularly noted. While presenting the strategies used in the various international contexts to contend with the challenges, the report suggests that local knowledge and insight cannot be underestimated as a major factor in developing successful Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tourism businesses

Addressing the Long-Term Management of High-level and Long-lived Nuclear Wastes as a Socio-Technical Problem:Insights from InSOTEC

This report summarises the lessons to be drawn from the three-year collaborative social sciences research project ‘International Socio-Technical Challenges for implementing geological disposal’ (InSOTEC). Adopting an approach that is relatively novel in this context, the project focused its investigations on the complex interplay between what are typically seen as distinct technical and social dimensions of radioactive waste management (RWM), in particular in the context of the design and implementation of geological disposal. The aim of the InSOTEC project was not to arrive at a prescription for facilitating the implementation of geological disposal, but to foster and deepen the growing awareness of the interaction between social and technical aspects of RWM that has been evident within the technical expert community by providing stakeholders and experts of all kinds with a better understanding of the processes that shape the challenges which confront them. The report brings together insights for RWM that have been generated within the different research strands of the project and offers observations on their implications for practice, addressing in particular the processes of research and development, public and stakeholder involvement in RWM, and long-term governance of geological disposal of higher activity radioactive wastes

Eliminating Language Barriers for LEP Individuals: Promising Practices from the Public Sector

While the focus of this report is on eliminating language barriers for limited English proficient (LEP) individuals, any strategy to improve communications with this population must also include English learning and address the shortage of high-quality English as a Second Language (ESL) courses for adults. State-administered ESL programs currently serve only about a million of the estimated 12.4 million LEP adults in the United States who need language instruction. The underfunding of ESL programs means that large numbers of immigrant adults who wish to learn English are unable to enroll in classes or face overcrowded classrooms. For instance, a 2006 national survey of ESL providers found that 57 percent of these programs maintained waiting lists -- ranging from a few weeks to more than three years -- and could not accommodate the high numbers of immigrants interested in learning English. Policy experts and organizations that work with adult English learners have proposed various strategies to increase the availability of high-quality ESL courses, but lack of political support at the national level -- coupled with the current fiscal crisis -- has weakened efforts to help immigrants improve their English skills

Knowledge management and communities of practice in the private sector: lessons for modernising the National Health Service in England and Wales

The National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales has embarked upon a radical and farreaching programme of change and reform. However, to date the results of organizational quality and service improvement initiatives in the public sector have been mixed, if not to say disappointing, with anticipated gains often failing to materialize or to be sustained in the longer term. This paper draws on the authors' recent extensive research into one of the principal methodologies for bringing about the sought after step change in the quality of health care in England and Wales. It explores how private sector knowledge management (KM) concepts and practices might contribute to the further development of public sector quality improvement initiatives in general and to the reform of the NHS in particular. Our analysis suggests there have been a number of problems and challenges in practice, not least a considerable naïvety around the issue of knowledge transfer and 'knowledge into practice' within health care organizations. We suggest four broad areas for possible development which also have important implications for other public sector organizations

Development of grid frameworks for clinical trials and epidemiological studies

E-Health initiatives such as electronic clinical trials and epidemiological studies require access to and usage of a range of both clinical and other data sets. Such data sets are typically only available over many heterogeneous domains where a plethora of often legacy based or in-house/bespoke IT solutions exist. Considerable efforts and investments are being made across the UK to upgrade the IT infrastructures across the National Health Service (NHS) such as the National Program for IT in the NHS (NPFIT) [1]. However, it is the case that currently independent and largely non-interoperable IT solutions exist across hospitals, trusts, disease registries and GP practices – this includes security as well as more general compute and data infrastructures. Grid technology allows issues of distribution and heterogeneity to be overcome, however the clinical trials domain places special demands on security and data which hitherto the Grid community have not satisfactorily addressed. These challenges are often common across many studies and trials hence the development of a re-usable framework for creation and subsequent management of such infrastructures is highly desirable. In this paper we present the challenges in developing such a framework and outline initial scenarios and prototypes developed within the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project [2]

Engaging Local Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the Response to HIV/AIDS.

During the past few years, a number of key donor programs have scaled up their global response to the crisis of HIV and AIDS. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the World Bank’s Multi-country HIV/AIDS Program (MAP), and other bilateral donors and charitable foundations have raised significant resources to fight HIV/AIDS. Spending on HIV/AIDS in low- and middle-income countries increased from $1 billion in 2000 to$6.1 billion in 2004. By 2007, global resources for HIV/AIDS are expected to expand to $10 billion. Local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), faith-based organizations (FBOs), and community-based organizations (CBOs) have been at the center of the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In many countries, they have been responsible for the majority of the resources reaching individuals and have played a leading role in developing and implementing sustainable strategies to mitigate and prevent HIV/AIDS. One of PEPFAR’s strategic principles is to encourage and strengthen faithbased and community-based non-governmental organizations. The identification of sustainable and efficient local NGOs and the capacity building of these partners is the cornerstone on which the effective engagement of local NGOs is built. The goal of this paper is to begin a discussion among donors, international and local NGOs, and multilateral and U.S. government representatives on how to effectively engage indigenous partners and transfer much-needed resources