Professor Frits van Merode had already said it to me in the early days of my PhD research: hospitals are actually run by nurses. I think his statement did not fully hit me or maybe in my subconscience I thought it was one of those things that is also said about ‘the wife behind the …
Time flies; my last blog was in September when I thought I was almost ready with my hospital social network. The social network is not yet complete – soon will be!! – so I will wait sharing that. In the meantime my first (scientific) paper (ever) has been accepted and will be published any time …
The fun thing about this blog is that I receive comments from different kind of people. Some people comment that they think my blog too long to be a blog (it turned out all individual blogs all in one long thread came accross as one (yes indeed) very long blog: if you click on the three …
Today I was at a meeting with a bunch of scientists who (want to) do research in an open way, in some cases as a guest of a university, in some cases outside the university or as part of the university. It turns out that the university is not heaven on earth for everyone and …
In the past weeks I have been wondering what the next blog could be about. I have been working on social networks over summer and there is (too) much to say about that and at the same time I have questions on how to use these networks. I could probably blog 60 pages easily but …
In December last year I wrote a blog about the review of my first article. In this first article I described 106 logistical parameters, which I found in international literature. In the majority of the papers I had read, the focus was on one particular parameter – resource utilization or length of stay for example …
Over the past months I spent 14 days in the hospital for my case study research. I met and talked to more than 50 people, directly or indirectly involved in patient surgery and watched over 20 patients who were at some stage in the process towards having or having had a surgery. There are a …
A few weeks ago I observed 5 surgeries in the operating room. I had never been present at surgeries from start to end so this was an exciting experience for me. In the weeks before I had observed outpatient and nursing departments and I had been in the Operating Room Complex a lot, but being …
In many other industries outside health care, it is argued that well-functioning logistics positively affects the operations of an organization. Logistical optimization has led to cost efficiency, quality improvement and customer satisfaction. It is argued that this can also be applied to hospitals. But, to what industry should we compare hospitals? Logistics in fruit supply …
Last week I observed two nursing departments while preparing several patients for their surgery. In the morning I was linked to a nurse on the day care department. Together with another nurse they were responsible for guiding and preparing 10 patients for surgery for that day. I have modelled many hospital processes over the years …
