Problem 1: Design of an Effective Emergency Department
Lean engineering is making small changes or modifications in order to see big results. For example, you could move certain items to a new location or add and subtract them from the department to make improvements. In the ED, this includes wait time, discharge time, outsourcing, and overcrowding. Basically, lean engineers moved items around, and help create room designs to aid hospitals and staff. Lean engineering is the key to not only improving the quality of the emergency department, but also to helping in saving numerous lives. With this being the are of focus, small steps, as well as large ones can be taken in solving issues within hospitals. The main focus is to identify minor changes taken by Owensboro’s ED and its staff that helped make daily functions faster and smoother. There will also be an identification of some changes the hospital made to its structure, whether it be room design or even object placement. This will help aid in what may work or not work in other hospitals lacking the lean engineering necessary for full potential of the staff and ED. These changes can be brought to the attention of hospital staff and coordinators to define what the main issues they face are, as well as what they could change currently with little to no expense, to what they would need to change over the course of many years. Our group will identify this as a “care plan” that can suggest, rather than enforce, these changes to other Kentucky hospitals to maximize effectiveness in the ED. This will make a large impact on hospitals and staff because they are witnessing what success they could have as well by making minor tweaks within the workplace.
Problem 2: Exploring Human Physiology
Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a study linking the consumption of red meat, especially processed red meat, to several types of cancer. We were interested if these types of public statements affect people’s food choices. We hypothesized that after reading about the link to cancer, participants would decrease their meat consumption. We surveyed 18 randomly selected individuals about their meat consumption over the past week. We asked individuals to read a summary of the WHO study. Participants then recorded their meat consumption over the following week. We compared meat consumption before vs. after reading the article with a paired T-test. Surprisingly, we found meat consumption increased significantly after reading the WHO study. Following these results we surveyed a sub-sample of our participants regarding their meat consumption and thoughts about the potential link to cancer. There is some evidence that participants were simply unaware of how much meat they actually consumed and the identified increase was simply due to inaccurate reporting. Further research is required to ascertain the relationship between health proclamations and people's food habits.