Arnout Orelio: A Dutch Engineer Now Working in Lean Healthcare

Lean Blog Interviews - Healthcare, Manufacturing, Business, and Leadership

Show notes: https://leanblog.org/403

My guest for Episode #403 is Arnout Orelio, author of the book Lean Thinking for Emerging Healthcare Leaders: How to Develop Yourself and Implement Process Improvements.

Arnout is from the Netherlands, but we have crossed paths a number of times when he and many of his Dutch colleagues have come to the U.S. for events like the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, produced by Catalysis. His book, written in English, has a lot of great lessons for leaders and Lean practitioners in American healthcare and beyond. He has also written two books in Dutch.

Arnout and I have strikingly similar professional backgrounds and paths, which we discuss in the episode. We are both engineers who progressed from the automotive industry into healthcare. We talk about how he shifted into healthcare (in 2005, same year as me) and how this experience has reinforced that:

“Leadership is not a person, it’s a process. Everyone can be a leader if you want to change something.”

We talk about the differences in the Dutch healthcare system, at a high level, and the similarities in how Lean can be applied. We also discuss topics near and dear to my heart:

• Why Lean should keep employees (and patients) happy
• Process Behavior Charts
• Training Within Industry / Job Instruction
• Eliminating overburden for healthcare staff (see the first bullet point)
• The relevance of TWI to Covid vaccination

Here are his website and his publisher's websites, so please take a look.

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