Towards a Questionnaire to Measure Lean in Health Care

The rapid spread of Lean implementation within the health care sector has made it urgent to evaluate the effects of Lean on productivity, working conditions and health. Therefor an instrument is needed to measure Lean in primary care. The aim with this research is to find an instrument that captures the character of Lean. A literature search was conducted in Academic Search Elite, WileyOnlineLibrary, PubMed, Cinahl, PsycInfo, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, Emerald and Scopus. Keywords used were reflecting Lean and measurement and the search resulted in 7933 hits. Included were articles that presented an instrument that had the possibilities to distinguish between high or low Lean adoption. Malmbrandt and Åhlstöm´s (2014) instrument fulfilled criteria and was chosen. The original instrument was firstly translated to Swedish. A back translation was made by a bilingual authorized translator. The prototype will be tested among health care professions in Sweden using the think aloud method (TA) with the aim to explore how the participants perceive and interpret the Swedish version (Collins 2003). Immediately afterwards, they will be interviewed about how they interprets specific expressions in the questionnaire. After every round of 5-15 interviews the prototype will be adjusted and when saturation is reached the TA will terminate. After psychometric tests the finalized Swedish version of the instrument is to be used in a longitudinal study to describe status of Lean and how Lean correlate with the health of primary health care staff, there working conditions and productivity over time