I was pondering over the last few days about whether or not Lean is an intellectual discipline or just something that needs to be done by people with 'dirty hands'.

The reason this has come up is having met with two competing organisations selling 'Lean Healthcare' I was able to witness first hand one pontificating and demonstrating their intellectual understanding of Lean, with graphs, statistics, charts and detailed research, and the second promoting the 'we learnt Lean on the shop floor of an automotive factory and that is the only way to do Lean'.

We are running a series of Open Workshops designed to help you get the most out of your improvement programme and to help you identify the barriers that are stopping you from engaging your staff, achieving the best results possible and sustaining the changes.

Details can be found by following the link to Events on Our Website.

If you have read other material from Amnis either on this blog or from our newletter or other communications you will know that we focus our Lean Healthcare efforts on not only improving Organisational Effectiveness but also on using it to improve Patient Safety, Patient Experience and Clinical Outcomes.

I was chatting to one of the Change Agents within one of the clients we are working with this week and we were discussing the fact that he was struggling to engage his line manager in the process.

The programme is being driven from the board of the organisation and the line manager was part of establishing the team but has never really engaged with the process and it is having a very negative effect on the Change Agent who says he is thinking of giving up being involved in the programme.

As with my post of yesterday, I was chatting today with a friend who is leading an Acute Trust's drive to achieve Foundation Status and she made a statement which I thought would make an interesting post about Lean Healthcare.

I met with a friend who works at an SHA today and she has recently been on a training course to develop her 'Lean Skills' (sadly not one of ours but there you go!) and during the five day course (which was manufacturing focused) it seems that they covered a whole range of pointless tools that you would only rarely use in a manufacturing context and which have very little application in a healthcare environment.

Just to let you know that there are some useful Lean Healthcare articles amongst my Ezine Article Submissions which can be found here........  http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Mark_Eaton

To many 'Lean Healthcare' programmes focus purely on the tools and completely ignore the problems associated with getting the team to 'come with you' on the journey!

More important than the tools of Lean is the Cultural Change, Systems to Sustain Improvement and the need for Leadership Involvement at all stages.

What do you think?

Having been asked several times in the last two weeks about the difference between Lean and Six Sigma and also how people could integrate a focus on Patient Safety (Risk Management) into their Lean Healthcare programme, I thought I would give readers the opportunity to download our free eBook 'Integrating Lean, Six Sigma & Risk Management' which provide a short introduction to these three powerful approaches to improvement and how they actually overlap quite a bit.

As you will have read before on this blog, only 25% of Lean Healththcare programmes will deliver the results that your organisation are looking for but we have some exciting news!

Coming in the next month is the opportunity to download our new FREE eBook on 'Sustaining Lean Healthcare Programmes'. Our eBook 'Lean for Practitioners' was described as 'Inspiring' whilst the first drafts of Sustaining Lean Healthcare Programmes' has been described by the reviewers as 'Essential Reading'.