Shouldice Hospital Case Summary

➢ Company Overview:
Shouldice Hospital is a privately owned surgical hospital which specializes in external abdominal wall hernia repair with holistic recovery services. The Shouldice facility located near Toronto, Canada, was founded by Dr. Earle Shouldice in 1945 and is the world’s leading center of excellence in abdominal hernia repair. Shouldice Hospital employs nearly 160 employees with an average tenure of 10 years. Shouldice Hospital, with an 80% referral rate, conducts more than 7,000 hernia surgical repairs annually with a 99.5% lifetime success rate. According to the company website, the 89 bed hospital “offers its patients a complete and holistic recovery program that promotes health and a rapid return to normal activities” (Shouldice,
When analyzing the process the first step is acting questions about the process. Some of the questions asked during this step are: is the flow logical?, Are any steps or activities missing?, and are there any duplications? (Stevenson, 2012 p. 398). When planning the increasing capacity of the current hospital or expanding the hospital Dr. Shouldice will want to include these questions in the planning. During the second part of analyzing the process Dr. Shouldice will want to ask several more questions. The questions asked should be; Could the time be shortened?, Could the cost to perform the step be reduced?, and could two or more steps be combined?. Dr. Shouldice used this process when determining how the hospital could increase its capacity. Dr. Shouldice said “We could go to Saturday operations and increase our capacity by 20% or, with an investment of perhaps $2 million and permission from the provincial government, we could add another floor of rooms to the hospital, expand our number of beds by 50%, and schedule the operating rooms more heavily” (Heskett, 2012 p. 11). This process outlined by Dr. Shouldice would translate very well to a flow chart to visually see the process in