Lean is medicine for healthcare

Healthcare is full of committed, highly trained and motivated staff who struggle daily to work with broken, wasteful and disconnected systems and processes. Within the Lean philosophy, Lean techniques have many of the solutions to sort out, repair and align these processes to organisational objectives. The solutions themselves come from within the teams working in the systems and processes. It uses consultative tools to involve all the appropriate people, share problems and work on solutions together. It takes a whole system approach so changes in one area do not impact on the adjacent process or service.
 
What are the symptoms?If left unchecked, organisations grow in an uncontrolled organic manner. People come and go, ideas change, new technology comes in, new buildings are occupied. The world changes. Many of these changes leave behind broken processes and systems that people try their hardest to work with. The systems then get bypassed or complicated by people trying their best, to swim against a tide of frustration and difficulty. When the organisation is as large as a Healthcare organisation then the potential for these tangles and confusion is enormous.

Lean philosophy looks at systems and processes from the point of view of the people running them and the patients/clients/carers going through the process. The elimination of waste and allows clinicians to maximise their time with patients rather than chasing people, information or equipment. It lays out the importance of value added time and minimises or designs out time-wasting activities, precious time that could be spent giving care, treatment or diagnosis. It provides clarity and focus for auxiliary services or partner organisations to make sure they know what is expected of them and when it should happen. It eliminates disconnects and mis-information and gets people talking together and sharing the ownership of the new systems and processes that they helped to design. It fires people's imagination and makes everyone a problem solver. It makes everyone clear on their part to play and reduces frustration.

Lean gives back the time stolen from clinicians and diagnoticians
The time that should be spent serving patients and clients, not serving the systems

Today's environment is more demanding than ever. The healthcare sector is coming under increasing pressure to deploy resources more efficiently and improve service delivery. Applying lean strategies can assist organisations to make efficiency improvements at the same time as maximising service delivery. This may seem impossible but the traditional approach to financial efficiency (slash and burn)- budget cuts/work faster are not key elements of Lean. By concentrating on the process and making it more efficient and safer then this often leads to financial savings. At the Lean Healthcare academy we use a blended learning approach consisting of strategy development, classroom and e-learning delivery, backed up by implementation support will help your organisation to succeed.

To find out more about how the Lean Healthcare Academy can help your organisation achieve real cost and time savings while improving the patient experience, contact Wendy Gauntley on 01943 885 084 or email wendy.gauntley@leanhealthcareacademy.co.uk