Lean is medicine for healthcare

Healthcare is full of commited, highly trained and motivated staff who struggle daily to work with broken and disconnected systems and processes. Lean techniques have many of the solutions to sort out, repair and align these processes. The solutions come from within the teams working within the systems and processes. It uses consultative tools to involve all the appropriate people, share problems and work on solutions together.

Successes

Click here to view some case studies of projects that the Lean Healthcare Academy has supported.

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 going through the process. The elimination of waste (see what is lean) 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 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, 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 efficieny improvement- budget cuts and work faster are not key elements of Lean. Working smarter and more in harmony with the people and services that you interface with is the key. 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.

What can be achieved by adopting a Lean approach?

"Of the £1.6bn profit made this financial year, over £300m is directly attributable to Lean Thinking." James Womack, Lean Enterprise Institute 2005, about Tesco

Testimonials

See our testimonials for actual achievements made by other organisations we have worked with.

Virtual College's Lean facilitators comment on Lean:

"To drive out and sustain waste reduction, the whole organisation needs to develop and open mind and adopt a Lean culture" - Paul Brady

"BIT is a technique that helps people think more about how to make changes through the business and how to apply lean tools where necessary to help drive productivity whilst reducing waste" - Phil Davidson

"Waste is anything that uses resources but does not add real value to the end product or service being delivered, in the eyes of the consumer" - Judith Clarkson

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