Shouldice Case

How do you account for its successful performance?

There are several factors that support the success of Shouldice Hospital approach to perform Hernia surgeries in high volumes.

Standardization of Procedure

Each doctor is trained to perform the surgery using the" Shouldice Method". This guarantees a high level of success and in addition since hernia operations is the only surgery performed at the hospital; doctors are well aware and possess the expertise to react to unexpected issues.

Competitive Pricing

Standardizing the procedure helps improve the efficiency in how it is performed, which in turn it allows it to reduce it cost structure.

Recovery Phase

Using simple process to locally anesthetize patients, design the layout of the building and the processes to induce mobility, train its staff to promote activities to make patients right after surgery to move, enhances and shortens the time to recovery.

Pre-Admission Questionnaire

This process is essential to make sure that the process flows as expected. Doctors review each case to determine is potential patient fall within an acceptable threshold that meets the requirement for the operations.

Customer Service

The entire experience is geared to make sure that patients are comfortable and have a quick and safe recovery while at the hospital and clinic. Service is also geared toward meeting the needs to family members, which as per the case; they also help in the recovery process of the post-surgery.

Prepare a patient process flow diagram from arrival through surgery and determine the capabilities at each stage. For this diagram, only indicate major points in the process, e.g., admitting, examination, operating room surgeries, etc. Use the actual hours of operation for each step in the process to determine the capacity of each step. Where is the bottleneck?

The process is limited by the number of operations that the Hospital is able to perform. The case assumes that the surgeons operate only in the morning from 7:30 am to 12:30pm, a total of only 5 hours. The hospital could re-arrange the numbers of hours that doctors perform surgery. An increase of 3 hours would allow the hospital to increase its capacity by 62% or 20 more surgeries per day, and still be able to support the increase from the beds available point of view.

Do a detailed analysis of potential on-site capacity expansion alternatives (on a per week basis). Assume an average of 3.5 days stay at the hospital for each patient, including surgery, and Sunday admits. This means that half the patients spend three days while the other