The choice of small immediate rewards as opposed to larger delayed rewards, or delay discounting, is an important dimension of impulsive decision making. The inability to delay gratification is related to obesity, as well as other maladaptive behaviors such as substance abuse, problem drinking, smoking, pathological gambling, and risky HIV behaviors. One way to reduce delay discounting (DD) may...

OBJECTIVE In recognition of patient wait times, and deteriorating patient and staff satisfaction, we set out to improve these measures in our emergency department (ED) without adding any new funding or beds. METHODS In 2005 all staff in the ED at Hôtel-Dieu Grace Hospital began a transformation, employing Toyota Lean manufacturing principles to improve ED wait times and quality of care. Lean ...

The primary consequence of just-in-time (JIT) production is reduction of inventory. The associated benefit is (a) improved cashflow due to less financial resource tied up in inventory, and (b) less storage space required hence more productive plant area. Coupled with lean production and total quality management (TQM), it may also be possible to (c) improve worker productivity, (d) improve produ...

Martin L. Puterman, Yue Zhang, Sema K. Aydede, Becky Palmer, Stuart MacLeod, Hessam Bavafa and Jennifer MacKenzie Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, British Columbia, Canada College of Business and Innovation, The University of Toledo, Ohio, U.S.A. Provincial Health Services Authority, British Columbia, Canada The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania,...

The term “lean manufacturing”, (Womack et al., 1990), refers to the generalization of the Toyota Production system (TPS), also called Just-in-Time (JIT). One feature of such system is the reduction of costs through elimination of waste (Sugimori et al., 1977). Waste or muda (in Japanese) is anything that does not add value to a product. Elimination of muda is done by means of continuous improve...

reducing wastes in the healthcare processes is crucial for developing a high performance health system. adopted from the toyota production system (tps), the lean concept has emerged in recent years as a way of introducing innovative ideas to improve industrial processes. in the context of health care, lean is considered as a continuous improvement model, which provides healthcare organization t...

nowadays, customers ask for high quality products with less cost. so, the organizations such as iran transfo rey are looking for a solution to survive longer. implementation of lean production can lead the company to its target. the main goal of this research is evaluating the readiness of iran transfo rey co. for performing the lean production system through dimensional analysis model. in this...

Although lean is rapidly growing in popularity, its implementation is far from problem free and companies may experience difficulties sustaining long term success. In this paper, it is suggested that sustainable lean requires attention to both performance improvement and capability development. A framework for describing levels of lean capability is presented, based on a brief review of the lit...

Obesity is a condition characterized by an excess of body fat, hyperphagia, hyperinsulinaemia and moderate hyperglycaemia (Bray & York, 1979). The lactating rat, despite being hyperphagic, is hypoinsulinaemic (Flint et al., 1979), moderately hypoglycaemic (Robinson et al., 1978) and may display an extensive catabolism of body fat (Steingrimsdottir et al., 1980; Rolls et al., 1984). The purpose ...