By Betsy Finklea
The local Emergency Planning Committee of Dillon County met on September 22nd at a local restaurant.
Disaster Preparedness Director Moses Heyward reported that the two generator project for the county fire departments has received funding after two and a half years. A tabletop exercise is planned for October 5th at the City of Dillon Fire Department. Heyward also discussed the Disaster Preparedness pencil mitigation project. Pencils with a disaster preparedness message will be distributed to the young students at the schools.
Heyward discussed the mosquito control action plan in response to the Zika virus. The plan has been printed in The Dillon Herald. Some of the points from the plan include using insect repellent, wearing long sleeves and pants or permethrin-treated clothes, staying in places with air conditioning or that use door and window screens, emptying items that hold water that are located both inside or outside at least once a week, and public education.
The guest speaker was Frank Munn, Director of Critical Care Services at McLeod-Dillon. Munn spoke about the Dillon emergency department workflow improvements. They focused on increasing patient volumes (they saw 33,000 people in the ER last year), increasing quality of service, patient satisfaction, and reimbursement. They used the LEAN method of eliminating waste and establishing a starting and ending point. They did a Value Stream Analysis which is broken into small groups. and a rapid improvement event (RIE) which deals with the smaller groups.
The areas they worked on the RIEs were the delineation of roles which is having the right people in the right place at the right time; the triage process; minimizing the time on the admission/discharge/ transfer process; and inventory management, a staff satisfier, which is having the right supplies at the right time in the right places.
Munn also discussed A3 thinking, which is a systematic way to approach problem solving and eliminate waste. He said this is a culture change. He said they came up with a plan of standard work and a completion plan.
Munn talked about the improvements that had been made which. From January 1-July 31, the admission length of stay was reduced by 21 minutes. The discharge length of stay was reduced from 191 minutes to 178 minutes. The number who left without being seen was reduced from 2.2 percent to 1.44 percent.
On inventory management, they set par levels and worked on how supplies are ordered and replenished.
Munn also spoke on why they do what they do.
Munn said they had invested money, time, and resources, and this was a big investment on their part. Munn said it would take time to make drastic improvement, but he thought they were headed in the right direction.
