The Curmudgeon Shadows Jaded Julie

“Thank you, Jaded Julie, for allowing me to shadow you last week. I learned a lot.”

“Well, you weren’t much trouble. You didn’t get in my way, and only a few patients asked, ‘Who is the old guy?’ Why did you need to shadow a nurse, anyway?”

“Remember last month’s saying from Gemba Kaizen about going to where the action is—‘Go to Gemba.’ If I hope to teach you anything useful, I need to know what a nurse does. So I took my own advice and went to gemba.”

“So what did you learn in my gemba?”

“Good things first. You do a great job of caring for your patients. Despite having a lot to do, you were always compassionate and responsive to the patients’ needs.”

“Thanks for the kind words. Did you see anything that we should improve?”

“I didn’t see, but I heard…a very noisy TV set in a patient room. In my opinion, that’s not a healing environment. If I were a patient, I’d want to get well quickly just to get away from the noise.”

“To live up to your name, Curmudge, I suppose you found other things to complain about.”

“Let’s call them opportunities, Julie, not complaints. Nurses spend too much time writing, and you do it by hand. And you are seemingly in constant motion. It might be good exercise, but I’ll bet that a lot of it isn’t value added.”

“Okay, Curmudge, but what can we do about all this writing and running?”

“Our need for better technology is dire, but you can’t do much about that personally. Ultimately, you’ll be able to use Lean tools to make your processes more efficient.”

“Lean tools? Is that like a skinny monkey wrench?”

“No, they are techniques you can use to remove waste from your processes. We’ll talk about them later. Meanwhile, keep up the good work. Perhaps I’ll even return for another visit.”

“If you do, I’ll warn everyone that ‘The Kaizen Curmudgeon Is Coming’.”

“At least the patients won’t wonder who the old guy is.”

Affinity’s Kaizen Curmudgeon