Lean is philosophy of continuous improvement. At its heart is the belief that improvement is everyone’s job at every level throughout an organisation. It works by setting out clearly defined goals for an organisation and relentlessly works to achieve them. It uses a variety of tools and techniques to understand the current situation and then sets out how to change to meet the objectives. Improvements can be large scale projects or small incremental on the job ones, all are valued highly and have place in a Lean organisation as it works to achieve its goals.

What is Lean Healthcare?

Lean manufacturing is based on the Toyota Production system and manufacturing management best practice. Lean Healthcare is about using the underlying philosophy of understanding what is important (the Value) and eliminating everything that is waste (non- Value).

In manufacturing, customers define the value by spending their money on products or service. In healthcare the user of the service (Patient, Client, carer, parent, guardian etc) defines the value but the relationship between user and provider is more complex. To understand the Value in a service we ask everyone (staff, patients etc) a question “what is sustainably best for the patient/client?”

In the whole of healthcare we look for 4 value added activities in any service, pathway or department

PREVENTION - DIAGNOSIS - TREATMENT - CARE

If an activity is not one of the 4 value added activities or directly supports them then chances are it is wasteful and needs to be eliminated or optimised. Typically the value added time or steps in a healthcare process amount to less than 5% of the total activities and less than 0.05% of time. The most important part of Lean Healthcare is implementing and sustaining changes.
To help us understand waste and value there are a large number of tools and techniques which we have adapted from manufacturing and some we have created to help staff re-design services for the benefit of service users in the most realistic and sustainable way. After initial re-design work Lean concentrates on monitoring performance against organisational goals on an ongoing basis and supports staff in making incremental changes in a controlled way.