danceNo, Poka-Yoke is not an exciting new dance like the TapRooT® Shuffle we saw at the 2009 Summit (but you can be sure the reception planned for 2010 will also exceed your expectations!).

As much fun as the Summit is, the real reason we all come together is to learn new skills to save lives, reduce risk, improve safety, change behavior, stop human errors, improve production (and more!)

Poka-Yoke (pronounced POH-kah YOH-kay) refers to mistake-proofing techniques that either keep mistakes from occurring or indicate immediately when mistakes do occur.  Dr. John Grout will be teaching how mistake proofing techniques can be used to improve patient safety and to stop human error at the 2010 TapRooT® Summit, October 27-29 in San Antonio, Texas.  Summit attendees will have the opportunity to add these two informative best practice sessions to their custom schedule:

1. Using Mistake Proofing to Improve Patient Safety

The remedy for many of healthcare’s ills “is in changing systems of work. The remedy is in design,” says IHI’s Don Berwick.  Healthcare needs a diverse set of tools that will help their personnel know what to do differently; to give them a different “vocabulary” of responses to medical errors that lead to lasting improvements. Rick Croteau of the Joint Commission states, “techniques for designing safe processes are also known, waiting only to be adapted to health care.”  Mistake-proofing is one such technique that is a crucial addition to the tools used to improve patient safety. Mistake-proofing is a very powerful set of techniques that either keep errors and defects from occurring or indicate immediately when they do occur. It relies on creativity and common sense to create low cost, effective design changes that reduce errors. If you wish your organization’s personnel would just pay attention or if mistakes happen repeatedly, mistake-proofing provide a better solution.

2. Using Mistake Proofing to Stop Human Error

Significant injuries are avoided and dollars are saved by companies around the world when they implement simple ideas that either eliminate the chance for a mistake to occur or make a mistake easy to detect. This concept (and the techniques that generate these simple fixes) is called Mistake-Proofing. It is also known as Poka-Yoke (pronounced POH-kah YOH-kay). This session will help you find practical, effective ways to remove the opportunities for error. What will you learn?

· Why we make mistakes
· Basic concepts of mistake-proofing
· Where mistake-proofing works well and where it does not
· Where mistake proofing fits in your quality or safety toolbox
· How to create poka-yokes that solve quality or safety problems

john_grout2John Grout is Dean of the Campbell School of Business at Berry College, Rome, Georgia, and the David C. Garrett Jr. Professor of Business Administration.

Dr. Grout has researched mistake-proofing extensively for the past 16 years. In 2004 John received the Shingo Prize for his paper, The Human Side of Mistake-Proofing with Douglas Stewart. The Shingo prize is named after Shigeo Shingo, noted industrial engineer and one of the developers of the Toyota Production System. The Shingo Prize has been described by Business Week as the “Nobel Prize of Manufacturing.”

LEARN MORE about Dr. Grout and our other exciting line-up of Best Practice presenters on our webpage!