I was asked today to define what an Improvement Sponsor was and what role they played. Of course, my first reference was to our standard guide to the essential roles you need to have to make your Lean Healthcare Programme successful, with the starter text for an Improvement Sponsor shown below:

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Someone asked me this week for a definitive approach to Lean and to be honest it threw me. Obviously, there is the approach adopted by Toyota, and that suits them very well, but in terms of there being a definitive and fully agreed approach to Lean I could honestly say that there was none.

Although many people have discovered that Lean is a powerful tool in helping Healthcare Organisations, have you noticed that it contains many of the same elements that earlier improvement programmes consisted of? For example, many of the Lean tools were being promoted by the NHS's Modernisation Agency, admittedly often a little disguised.

I was chatting to a Mental Health Trust this week and they were discussing the problems they have had with working with management consultancies working who have projected Lean as some form of mystical black art that can only be delivered by people in suits (their words but I liked them).

I promised to update the blog after we had undertaken the experimental exercise to apply Lean Healthcare to a reduction in Medication Risk as opposed to simply Service Redesign and although it was a fraught and stressful journey, with the support of the nursing and medical staff as well as the National Patient Safety Agency we have managed to apply Lean Healthcare (and particularly VSAs) to the reduction in Risk.

We are offering recipients of our FREE Lean Healthcare Newsletter an opportunity to attend one of our Open Workshops on 'Moving Forward' for FREE as a special New Year Thank You for being a member of our network.

With many Healthcare Organisations undertaking numerous Service Improvement Programmes is begs the question about how integrated their Lean Healthcare Programme is into their overall improvement strategy....or indeed if they have one!

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.

Next week is another interesting week in the world of Lean Healthcare. Mental Health Trusts have started to realise that Lean also has applications in their arena and we are meeting with a further two trusts during the week (although I personally won't be going as I am working for most of the week in an Acute Trust).