Case Study
Updated -
August 4, 2020
5 Minute Read
The challenge
Efforts to reduce bed turnaround time have historically focused on onerous—and often unsustainable—campaigns to convince physicians of the importance of discharging patients earlier in the day, ignoring non-clinical contributors.
The organization
Cedars Sinai Medical Center is a 952-bed teaching hospital located in Los Angeles, California, US. They experienced bed turnaround delays partially associated with understaffing of housekeeping at peak admission, discharge, and transfer times.
The approach
Cedars Sinai created a discharge team of support services staffed at peak times—admissions, discharges, and transfers—to concentrate onbed turnaround.
The result
The dedicated discharge team decreased average time to clean a roomby 40 percent—from 75 minutes to 45 minutes.
The unit experienced drastic reductions in bed turnaround times—before implementing the discharge team, the average time to clean a room was 75 minutes, and the team brought the time down to 45 minutes, a decrease of 40 percent.
Based on the success of the initial 9-month pilot, the program was rolled out house-wide at the end of 2007. Each team member is assigned to a zone of the hospital to mimic the pilot unit’s staffing arrangement, which had the added benefit of reducing housekeeper travel time.
