Process Improvement in a Veterinary Emergency Room

Butler, Elizabeth Allin

Student Work

Process Improvement in a Veterinary Emergency Room Public

In 2019, over 17,500 pets came through the ER of the Foster Hospital for Small Animals (Tufts University, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine). This enormous caseload, combined with a nationwide shortage of qualified emergency veterinary professionals, necessitates the development of a system to maximize efficiency in the ER to minimize error, wait times, patient suffering, and staff burnout. Strategies to identify and eliminate the wasteful practices in the ER were devised using the Toyota Production System and other efficiency ideologies. The Emergency Severity Index was modified using a list of triage discriminators developed by Ruys et al. in a 2012 study of the Manchester Triage System. This modified ESI algorithm was applied to 430 cases in a retrospective study.

Creator