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This one-hour documentary will be airing on Public Television stations across the country in April and May 2006. Contact your local PBS station for time and date.

Reported by former NBC anchor Lloyd Dobyns, this rare good news documentary reports on a surprising solution to escalating costs, unnecessary deaths and waste in America's hospitals. Doctors and nurses tell how they did their best, working overtime, while hospital conditions worsened. They were delighted to learn a new way to improve patient care and reduce unnecessary deaths, suffering, errors, infections and costs.

"A patient is not an automobile, but..." The unlikely solution was to use Toyota management principles called "systems thinking" to improve their hospitals. Systems thinking allows leaders and staff to see the complex, modern workplace with "new eyes" and turn problems into improvements. It has saved up to 50 percent in costs, thousands of lives, and avoided hundreds of thousands of medical errors. Dramatic improvements have already begun in hospitals in several major cities.

The documentary also describes America's deadly healthcare problem in detail for the first time on television:

The Problem

• Doctors, nurses and administrators reveal the dangerous conditions of American hospitals, and how the patient became lost in modern hospitals.

The Solution

• How staff put patient care and safety first and quickly began to reduce waste and improve clinical outcomes;

• How the reporting of errors and potential errors dramatically increased and enabled improved patient care when hospital administrators ceased focusing on blame; and

• An MD administrator predicts these new methods will solve the malpractice crisis.

The documentary reports on SSM Health Care system with 20 hospitals and 22,000 employees across the Midwest and a Pittsburgh initiative involving more than 40 hospitals. In 1989 SSM CEO Sister Mary Jean Ryan began to adopt methods developed by Americans in the l950s's to help Japanese industry. She also used the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria to teach systems ideas. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who raised safety and profits dramatically at Alcoa, when he was that company's CEO, using Toyota automobile manufacturing methods, introduced these ideas in l997 to the Pittsburgh hospitals with equally significant results.

Not incidentally, these hospitals leaders and staffs have done what the American automobile makers were not able to sustain as they tried such systems methods in the l980s. The automakers abandoned them for short-term profits, and currently are suffering huge, possibly fatal, losses while Japanese car manufacturers prosper. These ideas can be used to make any organization from a hospital, school, government agency, manufacturing plant — even an entire nation — more effective, efficient, and competitive.

Lloyd Dobyns, is the reporter for the documentary and notes that everyone is a potential patient. Producer Clare Crawford-Mason was also the producer of If Japan Can... Why Can't We? the NBC White Paper, also anchored by Dobyns, which introduced systems and quality ideas to the West in l980.

A companion how-to book, The Nun and the Bureaucrat-How They Found a Simple, Surprising Solution to a Deadly National Healthcare Problem is available from managementwisdom.com.

Note: This was the last documentary of the late Reuven Frank, pioneer television documentary producer. He served as its consulting senior producer. Frank was senior producer of the 1980 NBC White Paper, If Japan Can... Why Can't We? recently named the second-most influential documentary in the history of film and television by The Washington Times.