NHS should embrace lean times

A technique developed by the car industry could help staff, patients and reduce costs, says SA Mathieson

Since this event, the concept of lean healthcare does not appear to have spread widely across the NHS, unfortunately. In August 2012, the New Yorker reported on a few US hospital chains thinking of the same ideas.
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Charting a new course: data analysis of the NHS across the UK

Article on data analysis in the NHS, first published in Health Service Journal, 5 July 2005

Two years ago, Sheila Leatherman, research professor at University of North Carolina’s school of public health, and Kim Sutherland, a senior research associate at University of Cambridge’s Judge institute of management, wrote ‘The Quest for Quality in the NHS’ for the Nuffield Trust, comparing England’s NHS to other developed countries.

The authors noted the lack of a ‘shared robust information base that provides a common understanding of the NHS’s strengths and weaknesses’. Now, Prof Leatherman and Dr Sutherland have attempted to show that such an information base, using independent and routinely-reported data, can and should be compiled – by doing it themselves, through compiling more than 100 charts from numerous sources into a single chartbook of NHS quality.
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