How much walking do you have to do every day?

This is all excellent information, and I can use it in some articles I am writing about GENUINE health care reform. It confirms that the story I heard from a nurse a couple of weeks ago is not an isolated situation, and that the way nurses' jobs are designed includes enormous waste.

Henry Ford wrote more than 80 years ago that people cannot be paid to walk. In your case, assuming that you can walk 3 miles an hour inside a hospital, you spend 3.3 to 4 hours per shift walking. You can be paid only to take care of patients, which means you are actually paid for fewer than 9 of the 12 hours you work. To put this another way, fewer than 9 hours of genuine pay are spread over 12 hours of work, like butter being spread too thinly on bread. (I don't eat butter because of the fat, but it shows the idea.)

"Carrying" (transportation) is actually defined as a non-value-adding activity (waste) in lean manufacturing, e.g. if parts have to be moved from one part of the factory to another. The parts must obviously be moved to the work station, and the medications must obviously get to the patient, but the manner in which this is done defines the efficiency of the process. The idea of robotic carts to deliver medications from the pharmacy to the nurse's station came to mind immediately, and the FIRST item from a Google search on "robotic carts" yielded http://www.compukiss.com/articles/ro...-here-now.html " If you have been to the hospital lately, you might have seen robotic carts delivering medications and equipment."

This is still transportation (non-value-adding activity), but I'm pretty sure the robot's time, in terms of capital investment and electricity, is far less valuable than that of a nurse or other human worker.

If, however, value-adding work can be done while walking, such as assessing gaits, this is value-adding time and not waste.

I am thinking more in terms, though, of nurses having to walk to and from patient rooms to supply areas, pharmacies, data entry stations, and so on. One objection that doctors have to computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems is that they would have to walk to a computer to write a prescription as opposed to writing it on a pad. This is a valid objection because walking to and from the computer is waste. If the doctor has some kind of handheld device, it eliminates the need to walk. The same goes for entry of patient data (e.g. blood pressure and so on) by nurses; if you have to walk to a room to enter this information, it's wasted time. Here is an interesting question; do patient rooms have computer terminals or something similar into which nurses can enter this information, or are portable handheld devices available?