Although seasonal affective disorder isn’t recognized by psychiatric professionals as an official, distinct disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, seasonally-related changes in your mood could be related to a pre-existing depressive condition that is not being managed.

Typically, seasonal-related depression is diagnosed if:
• You’ve experienced depression and other symptoms for at least two consecutive years, during the same season.
• The periods of depression have been followed by periods without depression.
• There are no other explanations for the changes in your mood or behavior.

If this sounds like you, have a discussion with your primary care provider. Additionally you might try:
• Getting as much natural sunlight as possible–even a brief lunchtime walk can be beneficial. Try to make work and home environments bright and sit near windows.
• Exercising more. Regular exercise combats feelings of depression because your body releases mood boosting endorphins when you exercise.
• Trying not to overload yourself with work because putting yourself under undue pressure can exaggerate feelings of depression.
• Eating plenty of oily fish, which contain omega-3 fatty acids, important for boosting mood. Flax seeds and walnuts are also good sources. Also foods like chicken, turkey, lentils and sunflower seeds contain B vitamins, which keep the nervous system healthy. Research shows that people who follow a diet low in B vitamins suffer from more mood swings and are less happy than others.
• Exposure to bright light via a light box, for up to four hours a day, is effective in up to 85 percent of diagnosed cases of SAD. Ordinary light bulbs aren’t strong enough as they emit an intensity of 200-500 lux–the minimum dose necessary to treat SAD is 2,500 lux. The intensity of a bright summer day can be 100,000 lux! Search online for the best deal on light boxes.
• Antidepressant drugs known as SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors) like paroxetine and fluoxetine would help keep up serotonin levels in the brain. You might find that a combination of SSRIs and light therapy does the trick.

Dr. Brent Ridge is the health expert for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. You can call and ask him a question live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. Eastern on Sirius Satellite Radio, Channel 112 (1.866.675.6675). You can also follow along as he learns to grow his own food and raise goats on his farm in upstate New York by visiting www.beekman1802.com.

The basic premise of a six sigma project is  that there is a problem.  It could be due to quality, it could be due to productivity, or it could be due to speed.  It is that there is a set of expectation from internal or external customer which is not being met.

The projects get started based on this premise.  Upon time, however, the premise is not validated.  Is the problem there or not?  Is it perception or reality? Continue reading this post…

Work-life balance for women is such a vital issue in healthcare. It impacts the quality of life for the majority of healthcare workers, since 80% are female, and has a direct impact on both clinical quality and operational results. Studer Group conducted the largest study ever on how women in healthcare balance their work and life.  These findings will be released publicly today. I want to bring them to your attention.

Research has proven that lower employee turnover is correlated with shorter lengths of stay and a lower mortality rate.  Dr. Gerald Hickson’s work at Vanderbilt in patient safety and litigation shows that smooth handoffs and good explanations are critical to excellent safety and reducing claims. Staff satisfaction and turnover are the foundation of excellent performance, which is why these study results are so critical.

Here are a few findings based on 7,792 respondents: Continue reading this post…

One of the most important step in providing solution to any of the business needs is to understand the current process that is used to deliver the current solution.  Lean Six Sigma projects in healthcare are no exception to that rule.  In fact, the data suggests that about one million people get injured in hospitals due to lack of a robust process.

Project leads are encourage to map the process out as early as possible.  There are times, expert, think such an early process mapping is a waste.  Continue reading this post…

Any project healthcare project that is going to require management commitment to provide resources would be better off creating risk management plan.  Risk management plan is good for every project, regardless they require management approval for resources are not.  It however becomes crucial in later case to establish credibility to the project and the project lead.

There are typical four steps in risk management. Continue reading this post…

It is in our culture, in our psyche, and in our environment to “wage was against” something.  We have done it and done it with a sense of mission, pride and in relevant cases with patriotism.  We have raised war against drugs, against obesity, against crime, against terrorism, against cancer, against diabetes, against poverty, against globalization, against protectionism, and so on.

Irony is that they all have failed and all those in the future will fail.  Why?  Continue reading this post…

As discussed in the previous articles on Lean Sigma in Healthcare, one of the key to personal as well as project success is to have a strong project management skills.  It is important to differentiate between knowledge and skills.  The project management certifications and ability to create PERT/Gantt chart or calculate EVA is neither necessary not sufficient to become a great project manager.

The key to becoming a project manager in healthcare and beyond is to be able to create a credible list of activities and understand their dependencies.  It requires that one has knack for understanding the financials as well as can easily articulate the vision for the project, for the task, and for the schedule.  One should be able to mentor the team effectively.

It is not about  holding meetings and facilitating decision making and reporting status.

Here we discuss a tool that is very good for reasonable size projects from various point of views.  Its benefits go beyond project management needs.  It can be used for

1) Re-sequencing the tasks to minimize iterations and thus reducing risk, execution cost, cycle time, and scrap rate

2) Calculating stochastic risks for different schedules

3) Deciding the right functional participation of sub-teams

4) Designing the architecture of the product or system

5) Designing effective organization, etc. Continue reading this post…

I am a first time voter in America and in fact this is the first time I am going to be voting in my life.  As I head to the polls, it is a very big responsibility. I recall in by birth country, voting was given importance of a major religious event.  It was a big ritual. I still take it as that.

As I think of the voting, I am worried about the current economic crisis.  But what worries me even more is the healthcare crisis.  And the fact that the solutions offered has been little to make any fundamental changes with sustaining power.  While economy may be the biggest problem, it will pass.  The media attention is heavy on the economic crisis not because it is such a big deal but because it has impact on the rich people.  If it were about common masses, then healthcare would be the top of the agenda.  Healthcare is the silent tsunami…the silent killer.  Media creates the perception of importance and it has not done much for healthcare crisis. Continue reading this post…

Most of the Six Sigma projects, healthcare or not, are reasonably small.  However, we recommend that project lead must create a project plan and earn the trust of team members as well as management.  Very often, what we see is that the six sigma projects lead somehow tend to ask for unhindered access to resources.  They do not know what to do and in the process they lose their team members.

Many times, team members and managers have told me that these projects seems to have endless meetings.  We can not run projects through meetings!  Many believe that the leads are doing little work and are assigning almost all the work to others. Continue reading this post…

Previous sections discussed how voice of customer can be converted into business deliverables in healthcare lean Six Sigma projects.  The two potential ways are using of CTQ tree and Quality Functional Deployment.

QFD is a very popular tool developed in Japan.  Is is also called House of Quality.  The name comes from the appearance of the QFD. Continue reading this post…