For the course "Managing people and healthcare", which is (kind of) a revelation from the clinician's perspective, we went to Kingston Hospital to investigate process redesign in healthcare. After going through doubts concerning what to address (the topic is quite vast...), and contacting the trust's STD clinic (just ask how Carole ended up being asked if she needed a Chlamydia screen...), we got into lean thinking and its various tool. It is a quite simple concept behind the success of Toyota, and the aim of lean thinking is to create an organizational culture that identify and eliminate waste wherever it occurs in business processes. While it has been developed for the manufacturing sector, it can be applied to the service industry, and healthcare is no exception. As a clinician, inefficient pathways of care (read business processes) drive me crazy, and that's what brought me to this health management course.
Many tools are available to "get lean", and a fast and (almost) easy way to produce changes is rapid improvement events. It is quite easy to understand for key stakeholders and simple to implement. I'm already dreaming of applying it to our inventory management in Québec (CHUL)
If you too want to eliminate waste from your processes (whatever they are...), I'd recommend the excellent report "Going lean in the NHS" published by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement (you will need to register). You could also go for the original book or just have a look at this brief video... If you're lazy!
This work by
Stéphane Lemire is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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