Lean Enterprise Academy Discussion Paper – The NHS Bermuda Triangle (and how to escape it)

According to the Lean Enterprise Academy “Lean works in healthcare. in experiments where lean thinking has been applied properly, the results – in terms of patient care, costs and quality – have been extraordinary……..[but] lean will never take root in the NHS as it stands: it is management that needs to change NOT lean. It’s not because the ideas are wrong or the principles don’t apply, but because lean contradicts with the way the NHS is currently managed: when NHS managers come across lean they are often enthusiastic about its potential but the cannot and do not create the conditions for its benefits to be maintained.”

The Academy has published a discussion paper. Titled The NHS Bermuda Triangle (and how to escape it) the paper should be of interest to board members, managers and clinicians with an interest in improving the safety and quality of care, while reducing costs. The authors posit that lean should be of particular interest to commissioning bodies particularly given their claim that in the acute sector commissioners are “currently……paying for 85% wasted time per patient.”

Download the paper here.

In addition, readers might be interested in what the always perceptive and inevitably ‘spot on’ MAC Partnership LLP have to say on this subject in their Heart of the Matter blog post of 19 February – click here.