Abstract

The Cape Fear Valley Hospital sees hundreds of inpatients every week that are often taking medication. As it is very important for the hospital’s staff to document these medications, the patients are encouraged to bring in any medications that they are currently taking. However, the hospital often fails to return these medications to their patients. This is because the hospital does not have a standardized process for the storing and returning of medications. We used Lean tools such as DMAIC to standardize this process and reduce the number of patients that are going home without their necessary medication. DMAIC is an acronym for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control, and using this step by step process ensures that the problem is carefully examined from all angles. Thanks to this detailed process, we thoroughly understood the problem, and its root causes before we started suggesting solutions. Implications of this study are that we can save the nurses time when assessing patients, more patients will get their medications when they check out, less space will be taken up by patient’s medications, and patients will save money because they will not have to replace lost medication. In turn, this will lead to increased patient satisfaction.