January 12, 2010 marked the one year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti. A fellow Lean Blogger, Mark Graban of http://leanblog.org was fortunate to meet a special person – Russell Maroni, an x-ray tech at Akron Children’s Hospital. He volunteered in Haiti for 15 days in February 2010 as part of the earthquake relief efforts. He was unexpectedly, and necessarily, pressed into service in a medical role, not only caring for patients, but also using his formal lean training from ACH to help improve processes and radiology patient throughput at a field hospital. This is a copy of Russell’s A3 Report, click on the picture to view a pdf of the full size A3.
Mark said in a letter to me last week:
Russell wrote a very compelling, and very personal, journal during his time in Haiti. He and his colleagues took many pictures. They are sharing this all in a PDF eBook that they are freely distributing – to share the story and to create awareness for Haiti relief needs. They are asking people who read the book to consider donating to the Friends of the Orphans, which runs an orphanage in Haiti.
The journal isn’t mainly a “lean story,” although it does include his hand-drawn A3 plan. It’s a very personal story, of his own prayer and contemplation of the trip, and his experiences in the midst of that tragedy.
I hope you will consider spreading the word about this project to your readers and/or listeners – on blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, radio, etc. Please feel free to forward this email to others you think might help.
To read more, go to http://www.LeanForHaiti.org, which has links to the PDF and our social media sites. If you have ideas for helping promote this, to hopefully make it “viral” in the Lean community, please let me know. We can kaizen the site and the book itself if you have suggestions, if there are defects, or if anything is unclear (especially on the website – a work in progress).
If you can help support this online, please share a link to any blog posts, etc. and I’ll list you and your site on the “Supporters of This Project” page on our site. If you have any questions, please let me know. This is purely a volunteer effort on Russell’s part and mine. We need all of the free marketing help we can get for this very good cause.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
Mark
Related information: www.leanforhaiti.org