LEA Door to Door Club member wins
HSJ Best Acute Trust award
We are honoured to be working in partnership with Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust who recently won the prestigious award. The Trust had to fight off tough opposition from several other Foundation Trusts including University College London Hospitals, Derby Hospitals, Northumbria Healthcare and Salford Royal.
After much deliberation the Judges chose Calderdale and Huddersfield describing them as “an extremely impressive and rounded organisation where care has been improved by focusing not just on safety but also on individual patient outcomes”.
The judging panel continued: “Calderdale and Huddersfield has shown a clear vision, excellent involvement and engagement with clinicians and a systematic application of improvement processes”.
We can only agree with the judge’s decision. Having worked with many healthcare organisations both across the UK and overseas we have noted that Calderdale and Huddersfield appear to be somewhat of an outlier compared to many in that, as opposed to regarding lean as an additional project, they rapidly integrate successful lean experiments into their mainstream management processes.
The Trust elected to join our Healthcare ‘Door to Door’ Club after firstly reading copies of our latest publication, the book, ‘Making Hospitals Work’ and then by sending key staff on our 2 day workshop based on the book.
Since joining the club they have, by employing just some of the initial processes laid out in the book, reduced the average Length of Stay (LoS) for Medical patients on their Huddersfield by 24.75% and by 40.42% for Emergency Surgical Patients in less than six months!!!! Whilst benefiting from a vast reduction in the variation in LoS. They have recently duplicated the same processes on their Calderdale site and expecting to enjoy improvements of a similar magnitude.
Tania King, our main point of contact and Service Improvement Lead for the organisation explained “The first secret weapon (and there are many more to come) that we’ve employed is what Ian and Marc call the Visual Hospital. Since implementing just the Visual Hospital across both our sites we have seen a significant reduction in length of stay which is being maintained. Whilst I always had faith in the process I didn’t imagine the results would be so remarkable. We’re finally starting to achieve some stability in the patient flow processes in our hospitals”
May we take this opportunity to congratulate the Trust staff that made winning this award possible.
About ‘Making Hospitals Work’ - the Book
For the first time Making Hospitals Work provides a practical roadmap for healthcare leaders seeking to create truly lean hospitals. It outlines a clear framework for focusing improvement activities on the most important challenges facing each hospital.
It uses the same evidence based, scientific method as clinicians use to diagnose and treat medical problems to analyse and redesign the core emergency and elective patient journeys from arrival to discharge. It opens everyone’s eyes to the big win-win-win opportunities to eliminate unnecessary waiting time for patients, to synchronise activities so clinical staff can spend more time caring for patients and to free up capacity by reducing length of stay and cut the overtime and agency budget.
It also introduces the key new role of the value stream manager in gaining agreement on what needs to be done by whom in every department across the hospital. Every step described in Making Hospitals Work has been tried and tested in the seven years’ action research that led to this workbook. It is the critical breakthrough to take the next steps on the lean healthcare journey.
Read more about Making Hospitals Work - the book
About ‘Making Hospitals Work’ - the Workshop
Making Hospitals Work is a regular small group coaching 2 day workshop held at our offices in Goodrich, near Ross-on-Wye, or in-house at your hospital or organisation.
The workshop is run by the authors of ‘Making Hospitals Work’ Ian Taylor and Marc Baker and will help hospital management teams to answer the following questions:
- What are the biggest problems in your hospital?
- Do most of your patients go through similar diagnosis and treatment steps?
- How long does the end-to-end patient journey take - and how long could it take?
- What is the demand to get into your hospital – and how long do patients have to wait?
- How could you eliminate most of the waiting time within and between departments in your hospital?
- What is the demand to get out of your hospital – and how many patients are ready to go or are in the wrong beds?
- How could these activities be managed visually to track progress and to respond to problems and delays?
- Who will take responsibility for transforming the end-to-end patient journeys through your hospital?
Read more about Making Hospitals Work - the book - the workshop
Find more links about other Healthcare workshops and services run by Ian and Marc on the Healthcare homepage
About Us
The Lean Enterprise Academy is a non-profit Academy established to develop knowledge of Lean Thinking and its implementation and to disseminate this knowledge through publications and workshops.
Contact us
Enquiries: info@leanuk.org
Orders: orders@leanuk.org
Telephone
Enquiries: 01600 890590
Fax: 01600 890540
Address
The Old Vicarage
Goodrich
Ross-on-Wye
Herefordshire
HR9 6JE