This is the first in a series of posts that have been inspired by the presentation given by Andrew Lansley MP (Shadow Minister for Health) at the Royal Society of Arts on the 28th May 2009.
A point raised by Andrew was the need to have local responsibility within healthcare for designing effective systems rather than central control and in particular having the responsibility for dealing with problems. This reminded me of a meeting last week where the team wanted to develop a community based service to deal with the impact of a poorly designed process within an acute setting.
The team had already started working on their solution by the time we got involved and we had to dampen their enthusiasm a bit to take them back to first principles in that is seemed a waste of resources to design a second process purely to deal with the fact that a main process was not providing the right outcomes. Wasn’t it better to go back to the source and work with the Acute Trust to redesign their processes so that it delivered the right outcomes?
The enthusiasm for the team to solve ‘the problem’ as they saw it (ie dealing with a process with poor outcomes by adding a new process) did not actually address the underlying issue (ie a process with poor outcomes) and it was only when the team took responsibility for dealing with the root cause and committed to working across the health economy and not just within their sphere of influence that there was a chance the problem would go away for good rather than just be patched up.
To discuss this post and the issues that arose email Mark Eaton at markeaton(a)amnis.uk.com or ring him on 07841-464916.
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