Altona’s Toyota plant is sharing its knowledge of production line efficiency to cut hospital treatment times for cancer patients.
Each year, the car manufacturer provides consulting services to one non-automotive organisation.
This year, its experts will work with the St Vincent’s Hospital oncology unit to streamline administrative processes and appointments. A previous project resulted in the average time taken to pack a cancer patient’s script being reduced from 3.5 hours to 34 minutes.
Toyota Australia president Dave Buttner said this year’s project aimed to reduce patient waiting times for radiation or chemotherapy from one hour to 20 minutes.
“Our team of experts is working closely with the oncology unit to streamline administrative processes and appointments,” Mr Buttner said.
“Not only will this result in staff doing their jobs more efficiently but, more importantly, patients will spend less time at the hospital.”
St Vincent’s chief executive Ben Fielding said Toyota previously helped the hospital’s pharmaceutical division improve the way it prepared pre-packaged medication.
“By applying concepts from the Toyota production system, the time taken to pack each script from start to finish was drastically reduced,” he said.
