Reflections from my sickness

Having gone through “living in hell” experience after 2 urgent operations in 10 days, and staying in bed in the last 3 weeks, luckily, my brain can still function normally except from time to time, need to battle with the unbearable pain. I manage to reflect on my daily routines and try to find some silver linings from this unpleasant experience. Hope these ‘painful’ reflections can help you in your future encounters.?#Lean #Reflection #PDCA

1. Why did I suddenly fall into this serious sickness? I have been living a very healthy lifestyle and had no major illness for more than 40+ years. I hardly take medical leave throughout my career life.?What happened? Just like what we have found in most air crash investigations, it is never a single cause that led to a disaster. There are multiple factors: Side effect of Coivd-19 (lower immune system), travelling (sudden change of the living environment, different food, different virus), emotion distress, not listening to the body when body give you a signal to stop, getting older... A simple fish bone diagram and Pareto of root cause analysis can help you narrow down the main reasons. For my case, it is the side effects of Covid-19 which lower down my immune system after confirmed by doctor. Covid-19 is not so serious, but the lower immune system can be very dangerous. Take care of yourself to avoid Covid.?Health is number 1, without 1, the rest of the 0s have no meaning. Keeping healthy is what you can control and should always be your top priority.?

2. Reduce process time by using SMED (single minute’s exchange of die): As doctor instruction, I need to use 3 spoons of salt to mix certain amount of water. Since the salt will take some time be dissolved even by stirring it, and 2nd round of dissolved water need to be ready immediately, so waiting for measuring salt by spoon, and dissolving of the salt made me clumsy and hasty in action, the amount of salt also often not accurate by using spoon. Quickly, I found a solution by using SMED to pre-prepare dissolved salt water in small glasses in advance, and in this way we also can the accurately measured amount of salt by weighing scale. (1 spoon of salt = 19 grams!)?When I need it, just pour dissolved salt water into the basin and use it, no more waiting time when you need it! (We also prepare other items needed before/during the process to cut down the waiting time!)?You can make your life better and easier by applying lean concepts!???

3. Process improvement on quality control with proper tools and by following instructions (standard):?

a. Accurate measuring tool. Do you know what the temperature range of warm water is? The warm water temperature range is from 32 to 43 deg C. Why is it so important? Because I used hot water to rinse my wound, and caused my 2nd urgent operation! (Even though the doctor said he is not sure it is good or bad news as hot water made my sickness root cause shown quickly!) In your home, you should have a thermal meter to check your body temperature, but do you have a tool to measure water temperature instantly? Luckily, I have a sensor prober with temperature display for measuring liquid! With this proper tool it is possible to measure warm water temperature quickly and control the process well.??

b. Process improvement on the quality of the cleaning by adopting special tool. Originally, I used shower head in the bathroom to clean the wound, it is difficult to control the pressure and water temperature, and not able to focus on my wound area. By using specific portable bidets, water pressure and accurate direction of the water flow can be controlled, together with correct body positioning made the wound cleaned with much higher quality of the cleaning result.?

c. Determination to follow instructions from doctors. Strictly following the instruction (standard) of the process yields good results. The instruction says: the process need to be 20 mins, even I felt it was “living in the hell” during the 20 mins, but the persistence and willpower help me past every single second of that unbearable 20 mins in first few days, and result is good, I am getting better.?

4. PDCA improvement cycle. First you have a hypothesis of a problem to test, then you plan, do it, check the result, and adjust it. I suspected what I ate was the cause of the issue. I observed the 2nd time with the same food, after confirmed its effect, I stopped immediately that food, now the issue is solved. PDCA is the perfect way for us to improve! Isn’t our life comprised of many PDCA cycles??

Having positive open mindset, and keep searching for root cause, process improvement (time and quality, proper tools) for every situation, even though we can't control what arrive to us, but we can learn and adjust, and react to it through PDCA improvement cycles, we can yield best possible result! Isn’t that spirit of lean??