(Continuation of the article: Reducing costs and improving quality in the NHS!)

Part 2: Process Improvement

In the past, a vari­ety of meth­ods for process improve­ment from man­u­fac­tur­ing and ser­vice oper­a­tions have been switched to healthcare.

These meth­ods include:

1. Lean think­ing, which seeks to elim­i­nate activ­i­ties or process steps which do not add value to customers

2. The the­ory of con­straints, which seeks to elim­i­nate bot­tle­necks in processes

3. Six sigma, which aims to reduce vari­a­tion and cre­ate defect free services

We find that these indus­trial approaches, based on many years of improve­ment knowl­edge in other sec­tors, can make a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to cost and qual­ity improve­ment in health­care. How­ever, these tech­niques need to be trans­lated for a clin­i­cal and man­age­r­ial lead­ers can relate to, pro­vid­ing spe­cific clin­i­cal exam­ples and case stud­ies and cre­at­ing clin­i­cal cham­pi­ons for the appli­ca­tion of these techniques.

As these process improve­ment meth­ods become more com­mon­place in health­care and their ben­e­fits are demon­strated, they con­tribute to a new per­spec­tive amongst health­care lead­ers about where the real prob­lems are in the sys­tem and how to sys­tem­at­i­cally improve care. In future, the skills con­nected to this new way of think­ing will be an essen­tial capa­bil­ity for every finance leader.

Part 3 to follow

Writ­ten by Helen Bevan  (Direc­tor of Ser­vice Trans­for­ma­tion) and Micheal Caw­ley (Direc­tor of Finance and Busi­ness Ser­vices at the NHS Insti­tute for Inno­va­tion and Improvement).

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