Step‐by‐step process analysis for hospital facility management

Abstract

PurposeHealthcare systems are very costly and the inpatient treatment in hospitals is a major part of these costs. The question is, how can greater efficiency be effected without influencing the core business of a hospital – the cure of patients. Through improving the process flow of facility management (FM) processes, savings within these processes and less disturbance of primary processes should be accomplishable.Design/methodology/approachIn order to help introducing professional FM methods in hospitals the OPIK research project has designed standard processes for typical FM services. Processes have been field tested and evaluated in terms of interference with the core process as well as cost and quality factors have been determined.FindingsThe research has shown that standard processes can be defined and the performance can be improved through restructuring the process flow by having detailed knowledge of the process characteristics. The analysis of data through linear regression shows a significant correlation between product costs and possible clearing units. These results encourage to look for reasonable methods of cost allocation.Research limitations/implicationsIn terms of statistical significance the good results can be up valued through increasing the amount of data by applying the method in other hospitals. Future activities should concentrate on this room for improvement.Originality/valueFor the first time a reasonable basis for comparing FM processes in hospitals has been defined.

Skills, training and development within an insular labour market

“…Shohet and Lavy (2004) provide a comprehensive review of this theme which is one that has generated considerable role discussion among professionals in this area. This is an issue also considered by Akhlaghi (1997), Okoroh et al (2000) and Lennerts et al (2005). Consideration of human resource management themes in the context of catering and facilities in hospitals focuses primarily on operational and technical staff.…”

Integrating Augmented Reality into Building Information Modeling for Facility Management Case Studies

“…Considerable research works have looked into FM in the last ten years, which are mainly concentrated on the following aspects: Innovation process for FM (Mudrak et al 2005;Sharma et al 2007;Lavy 2008;Madritsch and May 2009), measurement system for FM (De Toni et al 2007;Meng and Minogue 2011), Enduser requirements for green FM (Nousiainen and Junnila 2008), and improvement for FM (Lennerts et al 2005;Leung et al 2005;Pennanen et al 2005;Lavy 2008). From the literature review, three main disadvantages have been identified in the state-of-the-art FM:…”

Facilities Management and Singapore’s Healthcare System

“…In addition, the unique nature of hospitals, that they are places where a mistake can cost the life of a human being, and the fact that FM is a critical component of hospital management contribute to the need for more research in this area. Research on hospital FM has mainly focused on issues of performance measurement and benchmarking (Lavy and Shohet 2009;Lennerts et al 2005;Shohet 2006). As stated above, those considering the performance measurement of hospital FM have tended to take an internal view from the FM departmental and organisational perspective and have mainly concentrated on one specific area, such as cleaning, catering, maintenance or waste management (Akter and Tränkler 2003;Cesarotti and Di Silvio 2006;Hwang et al 1999;Liyanage and Egbu 2008;Suess 1992).…”