24th - 26th February 2009
Amnis are delighted to announce the dates for our next Accelerated Lean Skills Programme that is approved by the Institute of Healthcare Management (IHM) for CPD Recognition.
 
Over the last year over 350 people have benefited from this highly practical programme that delivers just what it says on the tin - accelerated Lean skills for your first events.
 

Amnis's Mark Eaton spoke at the Lean & Six Sigma in Primary Care Conference earlier this week and it has already added two new PCT clients to our growing client list. This informative and useful session generated lots of discussion, with Mark's presentation generating some interesting testimonials including:
 

For some of our clients you will know that we have been ably supported by Susan Williams (former CEO of the NHS National Patient Safety Agency) in a number of our projects.
 
As we go from strength to strength we have been looking to expand our management team even further and in addition to continuing to work with Susan on strategically important projects, she will also be joining the management team as a Non-Exec Director.
 
The rest of the Management Team are delighted by her decision and look forward to a long and produtive relationship with Susan.

Ben Bradshshaw MP (Minister for Health) has sent us the following quote about our 'Sustaining Lean Healthcare Programmes' book.

"Thank you for the opportunity to read your publication 'Sustaining Lean Healthcare Programmes (a practitical survival guide)'. I regard it as being a useful addition to the toolkit of advice and guidance to health bodies that wish to successfully develop service improvement plans using Lean techniques."

Further Developments with Process Master 

Further to forming our partnership with Process Master that we announced a couple of weeks ago we will shortly be launching our 'Lean Pad for Healthcare' process mapping software. A sample shot is shown below using a pre-release version of the software. It was created by a Service Improvement Manager within an Acute Trust in 20 minutes (following 5 minutes of training):

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Several times over the last three weeks I have been involved in Lean Projects where staff have mentioned how they do not like the term 'Lean' as it has (as many will already know) the wrong connotation.

In chatting with Les Pyle (Amnis's Chairman) he suggested that if this was the case and the word was the wrong word (but the approach was the right approach) then maybe you needed to change the word. His suggestion was to use the term LITHE(tm) (Lean in the Health Environment)........

We now have 12 people booked onto our successful Accelerated Lean Skills Programme. We wanted to have no more than 15, so as at today there are 3 remining places......plus we have added an evening workshop focused on Patient Safety to increase the value of attendance further.

Download the flyer for this event from http://www.downloads.amnis-uk.com/ALSPFlyer.pdf. 

We are undertaking some additional research to further underpin our CRITICAL model of sustainable Lean. We were originally looking for up to 10 organisations and have already started with 8. We have now extended the offer to 15 organisations and are therefore looking for a further 7 organisations to participate in our research which simply consists of allowing up to 40 members of staff from the organisation completing a simple questionnaire and emailing it back to us.

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I was chatting to a friend today and he mentioned the Triangle of Fire. This is the definition of the three things that make fires 'successful' - this being 'Heat', 'Oxygen' and 'Fuel'. It is the job of fire-fighters to remove one of these three elements to extinguish the fire - for example, pouring water on the fire to remove the heat, spraying it with CO2 to remove the Oxygen or simply removing the fuel so that it goes out.

This made me immediately think of a Lean Healthcare Triangle of Fire - with the elements being:

Do you remember the rather bizarre statement made by Donald Rumsfeld about the Iraq War? He said something along the lines of "There are known knowns, there are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns." He was paraphrasing an interesting and useful concept that I have chosen to form the basis of this blog and it goes like this........