I was chatting to a Service Improvement Lead in a trust we are not working with and she told me that her 'Lean Healthcare Programme' was one of a number of initiatives in her organisation - none of which were connected but all of which made a greater or lesser impact on Patient Safety, Experience and Outcomes as well as Organisational Effectiveness - how daft is that? More importantly, how risky is it that one programme will counteract the benefits of another?

I ran a very exciting Lean Healthcare awareness session today. In the audience were a number of people who had been to other workshops which focused almost solely on the tools and terminology of Lean and left them feeling decidely 'unchuffed' that they were not told how to implement Lean (in a truly Healthcare manner rather than some form of 'modified' or hybrid manufacturing approach) and did not know how to sustain the improvements.

I have a week of Lean Healthcare activities coming up (2 days of improvement events, 1 day of Scoping and 1 day of training) with three different organisations (2 Acute Trusts and 1 PCT).

As I sit in a hotel in the Midlands with a member of our team I have been reviewing some of the comments we have gathered from organisations who have come to us after a Lean Healthcare programme has stalled and one of the most common problems was that 'it just did not deliver as much as we expected'.