Hospital Pharmacy Process Improvement Tools(Graphics not available)AbstractWith rising operating costs, patient safety awareness, and shortages of trained staff, there is It is becoming increasingly important for hospital pharmacy management to achieve positive operational decisions. In the case of hospital-based hospital pharmacies, making staffing and workflow decisions is difficult due to the complexity of the systems used and the variation in orders to be filled. Pharmacy delivery times are a crucial parameter for patient safety and healthcare worker satisfaction. The pharmacy management is constantly striving to reduce delivery times. To help Methodist Hospital Pharmacy management make workflow decisions, a team was created to analyze the impact of an alternative work process. The team examined the impact of process and workflow changes on the amount of time needed to process medication orders. The goal is to help the pharmacy management team find the best process and workflow to get medications to patients as quickly as possible. Systems thinking and Kaizen are used as tools to achieve this by using pharmaceutical staff effectively and making the process more efficient. The pharmacy division's initial goals for 2006-2007 were to increase patient safety by improving turnaround times (TAT) by 25 percent for the preparation, dispensing and delivery process for first-dose drug orders. Improved TAT means that the patient receives medications when they need them without delay, thus ensuring optimal, timely and safe administration of the medication. The objectives changed after the data was analyzed by the lean team using the value stream map. Systems Thinking (thinking transformation) and Kaizen (continuous improvement) were the main means that demonstrated a clear improvement. Six pharmacists and four technicians were selected as the "Lean Team". A workshop on systems thinking and Kaizen was held for three days, using a group model building approach. A facilitator introduced the qualitative system dynamics approach, which would be used to find a way to make sense of complex relationships and workflow.