© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press in association with the International Society for Quality in Health Care
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Editorial |
Some challenges facing Lean Thinking in healthcare
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
While improvement methods have delivered higher efficiency and better quality products, the question of applicability in healthcare is still clouded by uncertainty. Traditionally, there have been opposing views: on the one hand promoting large-scale industrial-type improvement to bring healthcare into the modern era and, on the other, arguing that people are not motor cars and that simplistic adoption will only exacerbate the extreme difficulties of delivering uniform, high-quality, care within tight resources to populations whose expectations continue to rise.
Lean Thinking originated with Taiichi Ohno [1], focused initially on operations management. Laursen et al. [2] describe how Lean Thinking reached operations around 1992, services around 1996 and the
Evidence
Value
Metrics
Conclusion
Funding
Chair of Healthcare Systems, School of Information Systems,
Computing and Mathematics,
Brunel University, UK
E-mail: terry.young@brunel.ac.uk
School of Computing and Information Engineering
University of Ulster, UK
E-mail: si.mcclean@ulster.ac.uk