Lean Healthcare

The Strategic Context

Healthcare systems across the globe are caught in a spiral of rising costs, demand for improved levels of service and unacceptable error rates.

In the UK the NHS centralised model has now given way to a regional structure with greater competition and control of budgets.

Within this context of hospitals determined to find ways of improving the experience of patients, deliver more services within budget and increase individual motivation – Lean healthcare offers the potential for everyone to win. The current problems of endemic delays, waste and harm are no longer sustainable financially or morally.

Acceptance of Change

An increasing number of healthcare trusts and private hospitals are now recognising that dramatic improvements in patient care, throughput, costs, and errors are readily achievable by using an industrially proven Lean model that has been adjusted to fit the context of our healthcare services.

Far from requiring additional funds it is now widely recognised that funding is adequate if endemic levels of waste are reduced.

How often do we hear embarrassed healthcare managers in the national press apologising for putting people in harms way unnecessarily and promising to undertake a review to ensure that the specific problem isn’t repeated. Invariably these quality errors do re-occur simply because of a fundamental failure to understand the basics of root cause analysis and error proofing.

Lean Healthcare fundamentally shifts the philosophy and emphasis of activity within a hospital or surgery, putting the patient and their pathway through the system at the centre of focus (not the consultants, managers or ministry).

Lean Healthcare seeks to dramatically improve flow by recognising that well over 50% of all hospital activity is pure waste and unnecessary. It provides the basic tools of continuous improvement to all staff who relish the opportunity to fundamentally improve the service they offer to their “customers” without the constraints of internal politics or hierarchy.

Read more about some of the Key Challenges and priorities within the UK Healthcare sector and how Lean can help us create the best Healthcare system in the world.