Why this Program?
Over 10,000 health professionals from major organizations such as Extendicare, Toronto Public Health and Aurora have successfully completed our Lean Healthcare Belt Programs. Here are some of the reasons why.
- Developed & delivered by Lean Healthcare Experts & Accomplished Clinical Experts.
- Apply-it-now approach generates immediate, tangible benefits.
- Receive one-on-one mentoring support throughout.
- Qualification in 24 weeks or less.
- Aligned with ISO 18404 standards.
- Entitles certified Canadian College of Health Leaders members (CHE / Fellow) to 10 Category II credits towards their maintenance of certification requirement.
- Flexibility to complete within 12 months.
Who is this program for?
This program is aimed at health professionals such as Quality Improvement Specialists, Operations Managers, Medical Directors, Clinical Leads, Project Managers, Patient Safety Leaders and Nurse Practitioners from organizations across the health sector including hospitals, health authorities, mental health and addictions, youth services, long term care, public and community health.
Program content & structure
The Lean Healthcare Black Belt program is made up of five learning blocks each containing a series of courses. One-on-one online mentoring support is provided for participants throughout the program and assessment is based on completing a course assignment and submission of a work-based improvement project.
Introducing Lean
- Introduction to Lean
- Lean principles
- Applying Lean in healthcare
- Identifying wastes
Understanding & Practicing Lean
- Lean healthcare tools and practices
- The Kaizen approach to healthcare
- PDSA and A3 thinking in Lean healthcare
- Problem solving in Lean healthcare
Planning for Breakthrough Improvements
- Planning for and initiating a Lean Activity
- Managing change in Lean implementation
- Demand, data collection, and analysis
- Value stream mapping in healthcare
Implementing & Sustaining Improvements
- Leading a Kaizen event in healthcare
- Leading a 6S initiative in healthcare
- Improving healthcare process capacity and flow
- Reducing healthcare variation and improving quality
- Lean and Six Sigma in healthcare
- Sustaining and controlling improvements
Implementing and Sustaining Improvements
- Lean Healthcare Strategy: Planning and Deployment
- Managing Lean Healthcare Programs
- Effective Leadership and Change Management
- Advanced Lean Healthcare Tools and Practices
Learn from leaders
Tony Soumas
Tony Soumas is a Lean leader with over 25 years’ experience. As well as delivering Belt training and coaching across the health sector, Tony specializes in strategy planning and deployment (Hoshin Kanri); Kaizen and root cause problem solving. Sample clients include Jewish General Hospital (Montreal); Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa; St Joseph’s Health Centre of Sudbury; Central Health (Newfoundland); Centre de Santé Communautaire du Témiskaming and Ottawa Public Health, among others.
Program fees & enrolment
The program fees per region are outlined below. All prices are exclusive of tax.
Book online
Visit our learning platform, LearnUpon, to book and pay for your online training course and get started today.
Any questions?
If you have any further questions, or want to register a group of 5 or more employees, get in touch:
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I thoroughly enjoyed participating in Leading Edge Group’s Lean Black Belt Program. Not only was the self-paced format well suited to fit into my schedule, its variety of formats – written, video, active assignments – made it dynamic and interesting.
The assignments built relevantly upon each other, and led logically to the capstone project, which for our organization, enabled us to boost medication reconciliation upon admission across our acute and mental health hospital from approximately 50% of the time to a sustained over 80% rate, with ongoing PDSA work as we continuously improve the quality of this work. In terms of career benefits.
I now lead a highly respected and successful quality team, and have actively promoted use of Lean and continuous improvement tools within this team, while they in turn do the same across our organization.
The program has met all of my expectations. The content provided was appropriate to the stage I was at in my Lean journey (Green Belt certified with 2.5 years in my role as quality improvement specialist). Exploring the overlap between Lean principles and tools and project management methodology helped me to structure my improvement projects, and the mentor definitely brought added value to the organization wide project.
My Black Belt project has had a very positive impact on the Lean maturity of our organization. Improved patient outcomes were realized through this project; we have experienced a 41% drop in our corporate rate of falls with harm. The three units experienced a 42%, 27% and 31% reduction in average number of call bells per day from pre-purposeful rounding implementation baseline.
The benefits to this are twofold, less noise on the units for patients and families and fewer distractions for nurses. This training also enabled me to coach and mentor 30 staff from all roles in the organization that completed the Green Belt training program. We developed and executed nine corporate projects through this endeavour.