“Throwing in the towel – improving hospital linen logistics”

A hospital may not be the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about logistics, but hospitals are large and complex environments throughout which logistics processes take place 24/7.

There are significant flows of material and information, and much of this is time critical and subject to wildly varying demand.  A project undertaken at one of our major public hospitals involved a review of the linen distribution process. The hospital has the largest acute services department in New Zealand, with 40 surgical areas requiring linen.

The project was initiated by the regional district health board’s health and safety team after a number of hospital workers suffered lost time injuries through moving heavy trolleys of linen. Scott McKay, a Christchurch-based logistics consultant, was called in to give advice, but it soon became apparent, he says, that a more thorough review of the overall process, including trolley design and build, was required.

“The first part of the project was effectively a discovery phase, to understand the current state of the overall process,” Scott explains. “This involved working with the local laundry, which was located externally to the hospital, the hospital’s own linen distribution centre, and the separate surgical areas. This discovery phase was undertaken after consultation with the various hospital stakeholders to ensure that everyone was on board with the project.”

As part of this discovery it became clear to Scott that there was little or no understanding of ‘demand’, and the entire linen delivery process operated as disparate components, with little or no value added at each point.

Ingrained problems

Around 50 items of linen were involved throughout the hospital, and these were distributed five days a week to the 40 surgical areas. From Scott’s initial observations, the process was seen to be relatively ineffective, with high cost of time and travel, high levels of inventory, multiple inventory points, and no measure of what demand was and whether it was met. “Exacerbating this was the ingrained vertical operating methodology which I could see would make it difficult to integrate any changes across the different departments,” Scott says.

Scott was able to deliver a ‘discovery’ report that highlighted savings potential of around $500,000 per annum, with significantly improved delivery performance if key changes were made – “and this was just for one hospital,” Scott exclaims.

These savings would come from a new process for delivering laundry that would significantly reduce time and travel and, crucially, reduce inventory holding points from three to two. “The latter would also free up crucial space within the hospital that could be used for patient care services,” Scott adds. “Weigh this against the DHB announcing a new hospital build programme costing around $400 million and you can see that, clearly, space is at a premium.”

Where to from here?

The next stage of the project is to work through the actual design of the new process with a critical aim of integrating all the previously disparate components to significantly improve the flow of materials across this large site.

“The potential benefits of this project are significant and far-reaching from a service and cost perspective,” Scott says. “This is not necessarily your typical ‘logistics project’, but the hospital environment creates major opportunities to develop and deliver more effective logistics process.”

Scott McKay is a senior consultant for INTENT Group Ltd based in Christchurch; he can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  This article appeared in the Logistics Council Quarterly Magazine in 2009.