One-stop vaccine storage for community nurses

Public Health Nurses at Pacific Spirit Community Health Centre spend a considerable amount of time gathering and packaging vaccines and supplies for immunization clinics. Prior to embarking on its in-house LEAN project in 2013, Pacific Spirit staff spent an estimated 16 hours per month on activities determined to be non-value adding according to LEAN principles. Prior to the project vaccines and supplies were stored in multiple locations and nurses needed to shuttle between two rooms to gather needed supplies and the Biological Product Monitor was spending approximately 30 hours per month on inventory management as well as packing orders for external clients.

With the assistance of a LEAN Advisor, staff at Pacific Spirit Community Health Center applied lean 5S principles for workspace organization to improve the situation. Products are placed in a single room to provide one-stop-shop convenience for nurses. Congestion is alleviated by removing items that are not needed from the room and placing them strategically to minimize travel and transportation. Standardized transparent containers are provided for easy product identification, to reduce errors and to reduce use of refrigerated storage space. Since the changes have been implemented, the Public Health Nurses are spending an estimated 8 hours each month gathering and packing vaccines and supplies for Immunization Clinics, a decrease of 50%. The Biological Product Monitor is also spending less time approximately 10 hours per month since we adopted the new changes. Product wastage is reduced by adopting a first-in-first-out product withdrawal principle and promoting use of partial lot products. Inventory management is simplified by presetting stock and order quantities.

Pacific Spirit’s LEAN vaccine management transformation produced significant improvements in staff satisfaction, with 70% of staff rating the changes as “good-to-very good” and the remaining 28% and 2% of staff saying utility of the new system is “the same” and “worse” respectively. Significant improvement in inventory management metrics were also recorded, including reductions in: inventory, number of product lots on hand, product shelf life and time required to update inventory.

Management and Staff at Pacific Spirit are adopting a continuous improvement mind set at every level and are next looking to improve workflow and inventory associated with the redistribution of vaccines to other community immunizers.

Team Members include Maureen Burke, Natalie Slomba, Jean Powell, Debbie Rhodes, Alison Bell, Jane Porter, Ingrid Kusnierczyk, Arne Faremo, Wendy DiPalma and Raymond Lim (LEAN Advisor), Linda Poirier, Marta Filipski and Lynn Buhler (sponsors).