Download a Free Chapter from Lean Hospitals
Get a free preview of Lean Hospitals, Mark Graban’s practical guide to improving quality, patient safety, and staff engagement through Lean thinking.
This free PDF includes the book’s introduction and Chapter 1, explaining why healthcare organizations need a better approach to improvement—and how Lean can help without burning out staff or relying on slogans and mandates.
If you’re exploring Lean in healthcare or evaluating whether the book is right for you, this chapter is a practical place to begin.
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Need help? Email Mark directly at mark [at] markgraban.com
What You’ll Learn in Chapter 1
Why healthcare needs a fundamentally different approach to improvement
Healthcare organizations are full of capable, committed people, yet many improvement efforts stall, fade out, or create new problems. Chapter 1 explains why traditional approaches—projects, mandates, cost-cutting programs, or telling people to “try harder”—so often fail, and why hospitals need a system-focused approach that addresses how work actually gets done.
What Lean really means in a healthcare context—and what it does not
Lean is frequently misunderstood as a set of tools, a productivity push, or a way to reduce staffing. This chapter clears up the most common myths about Lean in healthcare and reframes it as a management system focused on patient safety, quality, flow, and respect for people.
How poor systems—not poor performance—drive burnout and frustration
Burnout is not a personal resilience problem. Chapter 1 connects staff exhaustion, rework, delays, and workarounds to broken processes and poorly designed systems. It shows how Lean shifts the focus away from blaming individuals and toward fixing the conditions that make good work difficult.
Why improving care and improving staff experience are not tradeoffs
Many leaders believe they must choose between efficiency and compassion, or between financial performance and staff well-being. This chapter challenges that false choice and explains how Lean helps organizations improve safety, quality, and patient experience while also making work more sustainable for clinicians and frontline staff.
What makes Lean Hospitals different from “flavor-of-the-month” initiatives
Chapter 1 sets the foundation for the rest of the book by showing that Lean Hospitals is about long-term learning, leadership behavior, and daily improvement—not short-term projects or one-time transformations.