Why lean healthcare?
Lean Thinking is a method for organising complex service and manufacturing processes to provide large numbers of goods or services rapidly and at high quality.
Lean Thinking was originally developed by the Toyota motor company and has now been incorporated into modern manufacturing and services industries of many kinds. It has materially contributed to safety and quality wherever it has been applied.
Recent problems in healthcare
Over recent decades healthcare has become:
- more expensive
- more complicated
- more sophisticated.
However many people still die each year or suffer temporary or long lasting disability as a direct result of an adverse event in the healthcare system.
Problems of safety and quality are common in every industry where there are complex and large-scale mass production processes which involve many different groups of people.
In these systems people are often forced to intervene, making last minute adjustments and become experts at fire fighting. They manage despite the system, rather than because of it.
Lean Thinking
The principles of Lean Thinking have been developed to tackle just such problems. They have been successfully applied in other complex human service industries. There is increasing evidence that the same ideas and principles can bring major benefits to healthcare systems.
Lean Thinking in healthcare is not about cost, nor about ‘efficiency' or staff cuts. It is about improving the safety and quality of healthcare by applying a series of continuous incremental improvements.