Measuring Productivity - Research Paper Example

Measuring Productivity in hospital Laboratory Number Measuring Productivity in hospital Laboratory This productivity measurement will be based on a hospital laboratory. It will focus on the Microbiology department. The main activities undertaken by the department involve screening of body tissues or fluids for infectious microbes. The primary inputs in this unit include: preparing specimen for centrifuging; tagging tubes, preparing cell samples, adding chemical reagents and samples of specimen to test tubes and centrifuging (Ozcan, 2012).

Key outputs include: displaying the results on screen or in print form, interpreting them and compiling the reports. As Lippi, Mattiuzzi and Plebani (2015) said, some of the factors that should be considered when establishing the primary productivity measure for the microbiology unit encompasses the duration of time spent by the staffs on hands on activities: that is, for a centrifuging operation, the most important productivity measure is usually the duration of time taken by a technologist to load and remove the centrifuge, not the spinning time.

Other time productivity measurements which are equally important to the process include: time of day, the technologist to patient or sample ratio, and the amount of time spent on preparing laboratory machines or conducting their routine maintenance (Langabeer, 2008). One productivity measure for this unit is: spending an average of 5 minutes on setting up the machines for use and conducting routine maintenance; 4 minutes for preparing each specimen for centrifuging; and displaying the deliverables on soft-copy and hard copies.

This productivity measure will optimize the primary microbiology activities by limiting potential time wastage on setting up the machine, placing the specimen for examination or relaying the results to physicians to facilitate interventions (Yakusheva, Lindrooth, & Weiss, 2014). However, the productivity measure can create the unintended consequence of impeding quality deliverables, which would otherwise be achieved if the technologists spent slightly longer time to conduct the screenings. ReferencesLangabeer, J.R. (2008).

Health care operations management. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.Ozcan, Y. A. (2012). Quantitative methods in health care management: Techniques and Applications (Laureate Education, Inc., custom ed.). San Francisco: Wiley. Lippi, G., Mattiuzzi, C., & Plebani, M., (2015). Ranking prestige of medical and laboratory technology journals. Clinical Chemistry & Laboratory Medicine, 53(4), e85-e87.Yakusheva, O., Lindrooth, R., & Weiss, M., (2014). Nurse Value-Added and Patient Outcomes in Acute Care.

Health Services Research, 49(6), 1767-1786.