Six Sigma in a Dutch hospital: does it work in the nursing department?

The Red Cross Hospital is a medium-sized general hospital with 385 beds, located in Beverwijk, The Netherlands. It also has a freestanding National Burn Care Centre. The Red Cross Hospital was the first hospital in The Netherlands with a quality system based on ISO 9000. At the end of 2001 the hospital started implementing Six Sigma. The process began with Executive Training for management and Green Belt (GB) training for 16 middle managers and other staff. Seven GB projects were started in the areas of accounts receivable, patient logistics, invoicing, medication, temporary workers, and length of stay in hospital. In February 2003 the final review of the first group was done and savings appeared to be three times higher than estimated beforehand. At present (May 2004) the fourth group of Green Belts has been trained. In this paper we briefly explain the Six Sigma was the next logical step in the quality approach of the hospital. We also discuss how it was implemented and we describe some case studies in the nursing departments.