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.
 

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):

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:

I was asked today to define what an Improvement Sponsor was and what role they played. Of course, my first reference was to our standard guide to the essential roles you need to have to make your Lean Healthcare Programme successful, with the starter text for an Improvement Sponsor shown below:

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Someone asked me this week for a definitive approach to Lean and to be honest it threw me. Obviously, there is the approach adopted by Toyota, and that suits them very well, but in terms of there being a definitive and fully agreed approach to Lean I could honestly say that there was none.

Although many people have discovered that Lean is a powerful tool in helping Healthcare Organisations, have you noticed that it contains many of the same elements that earlier improvement programmes consisted of? For example, many of the Lean tools were being promoted by the NHS's Modernisation Agency, admittedly often a little disguised.