Lean healthcare no Brasil: uma revisão bibliométrica

Abstract

The Brazilian health sector has problems such as overcrowding of beds and long waiting periods. The Lean philosophy has recently covered health, being denominated Lean Healthcare, with the purpose of reducing or eliminating the problems faced by this area. This paper aims to conduct a bibliometric review about Lean Healthcare, in order to identify the regions of Brazil that do more researches about its application and detail the most used tools and respective medical areas in which they were applied. As methodology, it was adopted a systematic exploratory procedure for extracting works from Scielo, Google Academic, Science Direct, Engineering Village and Scopus databases, with qualitative analysis facilitated by StArt software. 66 studies from 137 were selected and it were found publications concentrated in the Midwest, South and Southeast of Brazil. The Value Stream Mapping (81.3%) and Kaizen (25.8%) were used the most, besides other tools that were used in different hospital areas. The surgical area (21.2%), the urgency and emergency area (16.7%) and the oncology area — chemotherapy and radiotherapy — (13.6%) had greater prominence in the studies. Only 25.8% of studies presented implementations of the recommendations made. This bibliometric review brings indicators that demonstrate the impacts of Lean Healthcare practice only in Brazilian hospitals, in addition to the disparity of the regions in which the practice was implanted, and the relationship between hospital areas and tools used.