A Nordic evaluation of a work environment complement to Value Stream Mapping for increased sustainability of patient flows at hospitals - The NOVO Multicentre Study I

Conclusions: • Both the ErgoVSM and VSM tools seem mostly to result in intervention proposals causing improved or no change in the work environment without impaired performance. • Based on Swedish data only the use of ErgoVSM may result in some improvement of the work environment compared with VSM. Such an effect is weakly supported by the Icelandic data and not by the Danish data. Thus, only under some conditions the ErgoVSM tool may be used in favour of the VSM tool. • Most proposals were assessed to cause ergonomic improvements at system level (‘job content’ and ‘work situation’). This is in contrast to intervention proposals investigated in the ergonomic intervention literature mainly focusing task level and the individual (cf. Westgaard and Winkel, 2011).