It's been very encouraging to see results in U.K. and Sweden confirming lean in healthcare works all over the world.
I have spent the last few days in Sweden and visited St. Gorans hospital in Stockholm and the Lund University Hospital Lean Healthcare conference where I gave an address. I can say that there are committed leaders trying to transform their organizations in both places.The results are quite remarkable. Wait times in the ER at St. Gorans have dropped by half and door to balloon can be accomplished in less than 30 minutes!This all related to 5 years of redesign work using lean principles. At Lund standard work for executives is being developed and led by their committed CEO and the massive silos of academic medicine are being scaled and slowly dismantled.
In the U.K. Bolton hospital continues to post remarkable gains on their 5 year lean journey.Their stroke value stream work has led to a 23% reduction in mortality and their work on creating a care team which carefully assesses risk of pre-surgical hip patients has resulted in a 75% reduction in mortality.In addition wait times have plummeted in the ER. Their next challenge? Develop an end to end value stream for patients from the primary office who require hospitalization and then reduce hospitalization rates.Right now they get penalized for reducing hospital admission rates(sound familiar) but the CEO forges on because he knows it's the right thing to do.
These examples encourage the work we are facilitating in North America as it confirms dramatically better care can be delivered to all patients everywhere.The difference in Sweden is political leadership is engaged in the discussions. There were two national level politicians(one was the former health minister) at the lean meeting for the whole day in Lund! They thoughtfully listened,took notes and then made comments at the end of the day and pledged support of the work being done to redesign the system.
Washington could take a lesson from the Swedes.
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