June 2016 – HCSE Blog

25/06/2016

Precious Life Time

Imagine this scenario:

You develop some non-specific symptoms.

You see your GP who refers you urgently to a 2 week clinic.

You are seen, assessed, investigated and informed that … you have cancer!

The shock, denial, anger, blame, bargaining, depression, acceptance sequence kicks off … it is sometimes called the Kübler-Ross grief reaction … and it is a normal part of the human psyche.

But there is better news. You also learn that your condition is probably treatable, but that it will require chemotherapy, and that there are no guarantees of success.

You know that time is of the essence … the cancer is growing.

And time has a new relevance for you … it is called life time … and you know that you may not have as much left as you had hoped. Every hour is precious.

So now imagine your reaction when you attend your local chemotherapy day unit (CDU) for your first dose of chemotherapy and have to wait four hours for the toxic but potentially life-saving drugs.

They are very expensive and they have a short shelf-life so the NHS cannot afford to waste any. The Aseptic Unit team wait until all the safety checks are OK before they proceed to prepare your chemotherapy. That all takes time, about four hours.

Once the team get to know you it will go quicker. Hopefully.

It doesn’t.

The delays are not the result of unfamiliarity … they are the result of the design of the process.

All your fellow patients seem to suffer repeated waiting too, and you learn that they have been doing so for a long time. That seems to be the way it is. The waiting room is well used.

Everyone seems resigned to the belief that this is the best it can be.

They are not happy about it but they feel powerless to do anything.

Then one day someone demonstrates that it is not the best it can be.

It can be better. A lot better!

And they demonstrate that this better way can be designed.

And they demonstrate that they can learn how to design this better way.

And they demonstrate what happens when they apply their new learning …

… by doing it and by sharing their story of “what-we-did-and-how-we-did-it“.

If life time is so precious, why waste it?

And perhaps the most surprising outcome was that their safer, quicker, calmer design was also 20% more productive.

18/06/2016

The Capstan

A capstan is a simple machine for combining the effort of many people and enabling them to achieve more than any of them could do alone.

The word appears to have come into English from the Portuguese and Spanish sailors at around the time of the Crusades.

Each sailor works independently of the others. There is no requirement them to be equally strong because the capstan will combine their efforts. And the capstan also serves as a feedback loop because everyone can sense when someone else pushes harder or slackens off. It is an example of simple, efficient, effective, elegant design.

In the world of improvement we also need simple, efficient, effective and elegant ways to combine the efforts of many in achieving a common purpose. Such as raising the standards of excellence and weighing the anchors of resistance.

In health care improvement we have many simultaneous constraints and we have many stakeholders with specific perspectives and special expertise.

And if we are not careful they will tend to pull only in their preferred direction … like a multi-way tug-o-war. The result? No progress and exhausted protagonists.

There are those focused on improving productivity – Team Finance.

There are those focused on improving delivery – Team Operations.

There are those focused on improving safety – Team Governance.

And we are all tasked with improving quality – Team Everyone.

So we need a synergy machine that works like a capstan-of-old, and here is one design.

It has four poles and it always turns in a clockwise direction, so the direction of push is clear.

And when all the protagonists push in the same direction, they will get their own ‘win’ and also assist the others to make progress.

This is how the sails of success are hoisted to catch the wind of change; and how the anchors of anxiety are heaved free of the rocks of fear; and how the bureaucratic bilge is pumped overboard to lighten our load and improve our speed and agility.

And the more hands on the capstan the quicker we will achieve our common goal.

Collective excellence.

11/06/2016

Resuscitate-Review-Repair

We form emotional attachments to places where we have lived and worked. And it catches our attention when we see them in the news.

So this headline caught my eye, because I was a surgical SHO in Portsmouth in the closing years of the Second Millennium. The good old days when we still did 1:2 on call rotas (i.e. up to 104 hours per week) and we were paid 70% LESS for the on call hours than the Mon-Fri 9-5 work. We also had stable ‘firms’, superhuman senior registrars, a canteen that served hot food and strong coffee around the clock, and doctors mess parties that were … well … messy! A lot has changed. And not all for the better.

Here is the link to the fuller story about the emergency failures.

And from it we get the impression that this is a recent problem. And with a bit of a smack and some name-shame-blame-game feedback from the CQC, then all will be restored to robust health. H’mm. I am not so sure that is the full story.

Here is the monthly aggregate A&E 4-hour target performance chart for Portsmouth from 2010 to date.

It says “this is not a new problem“.

It also says that the ‘patient’ has been deteriorating spasmodically over six years and is now critically-ill.

And giving a critically-ill hospital a “good telling off” is about as effective as telling a critically-ill patient to “pull themselves together“. Inept management.

In A&E a critically-ill patient requires competent resuscitation using a tried-and-tested process of ABC. Airway, Breathing, Circulation.

Also, the A&E 4-hour performance is only a symptom of the sickness in the whole urgent care system. It is the reading on an emotometer inserted into the A&E orifice of the acute hospital! Just one piece in a much bigger flow jigsaw.

It only tells us the degree of distress … not the diagnosis … nor the required treatment.

So what level of A&E health can we realistically expect to be able to achieve? What is possible in the current climate of austerity? Just how chilled-out can the A&E cucumber run?

This is the corresponding A&E emotometer chart for a different district general hospital somewhere else in NHS England.

Luton & Dunstable Hospital to be specific.

This A&E happiness chart looks a lot healthier and it seems to be getting even healthier over time too. So this is possible.

Yes, but … if our hospital deteriorates enough to be put on the ‘critical list’ then we need to call in an Emergency Care Intensive Support Team (ECIST) to resuscitate us.

A very good idea.

And how do their critically-ill patients fare?

Here is the chart of one of them. The significant improvement following the ‘resuscitation’ is impressive to be sure!

But, disappointingly, it was not sustained and the patient ‘crashed’ again. Perhaps they were just too poorly? Perhaps the first resuscitation call was sent out too late? But at least they tried their best.

An experienced clinician might comment: Those are indeed a plausible explanations, but before we conclude that is the actual cause, can I check that we did not just treat the symptoms and miss the disease?

Q: So is it actually possible to resuscitate and repair a sick hospital? Is it possible to restore it to sustained health, by diagnosing and treating the cause, and not just the symptoms?

Here is the corresponding A&E emotometer chart of yet another hospital.

It shows the same pattern of deteriorating health. And it shows a dramatic improvement. It appears to have responded to some form of intervention.

And this time the significant improvement has sustained. The patient did not crash-and-burn again.

So what has happened here that explains this different picture?

This hospital had enough insight and humility to seek the assistance of someone who knew what to do and who had a proven track record of doing it. Dr Kate Silvester to be specific. A dual-trained doctor and manufacturing systems engineer.

Dr Kate is now a health care systems engineer (HCSE), and an experienced ‘hospital doctor’.

Dr Kate helped them to learn how to diagnose the root causes of their A&E 4-hr fever, and then she showed them how to design an effective treatment plan.

They did the re-design; they tested it; and they delivered their new design. Because they owned it, they understood it, and they trusted their own diagnosis-and-design competence.

And the evidence of their impact matching their intent speaks for itself.

04/06/201606/01/2024

A Recipe for Chaos

There is an easy and quick-to-cook recipe for chaos.

All we have to do is to ensure that the maximum number of jobs that we can do in a given time is set equal to the average number of jobs that we are required to do in the same period of time.

Eh?

That does not make sense. Our intuition says that looks like the perfect recipe for a hyper-efficient, zero-waste, zero idle-time design which is what we want.

I know it does, but it isn’t. Our intuition is tricking us.

It is the recipe for chaos – and to prove it all we will have to do a real world experiment – because to prove it using maths is really difficult. So difficult in fact that the formula was not revealed until 1962 – by a mathematician called John Kingman while a postgraduate student at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

The empirical experiment is very easy to do – all we need is a single step process – and a stream of jobs to do.

And we could do it for real, or we can simulate it using an Excel spreadsheet – which is much quicker.

So we set up our spreadsheet to simulate a new job arriving every X minutes and each job taking X minutes to complete.

Our operator can only do one job at a time so if a job arrives and the operator is busy the job joins the back of a queue of jobs and waits.

When the operator finishes a job it takes the next one from the front of the queue, the one that has been waiting longest.

And if there is no queue the operator will wait until the next job arrives.

Simple.

And when we run simulation the we see that there is indeed no queue, no jobs waiting and the operator is always busy (i.e. 100% utilised). Perfection!

BUT ….

This is not a realistic scenario. In reality there is always some random variation. Not all jobs require the same length of time, and jobs do not arrive at precisely the right intervals.

No matter, our confident intuition tells us. It will average out. Swings-and-roundabouts. Give-and-take.

It doesn’t.

And if you do not believe me just build the simple Excel model outlined above, verify that it works, then add some random variation to the time it takes to do each job … and observe what happens to the average waiting time.

What you will discover is that as soon as we add even a small amount of random variation we get a queue, and waiting and idle resources as well!

But not a steady, stable, predictable queue … Oh No! … We get an unsteady, unstable and unpredictable queue … we get chaos.

Try it.

So what? How does this abstract ‘queue theory’ apply to the real world?

Well, suppose we have a single black box system called ‘a hospital’ – patients arrive and we work hard to diagnose and treat them. And so long as we have enough resource-time to do all the jobs we are OK. No unstable queues. No unpredictable waiting.

But time-costs-money and we have an annual cost improvement target (CIP) that we are required to meet so we need to ‘trim’ resource-time capacity to push up resource utilisation. And we will call that an ‘efficiency improvement’ which is good … yes?

It isn’t actually. I can just as easily push up my ‘utilisation’ by working slower, or doing stuff I do not need to, or by making mistakes that I have to check for and then correct. I can easily make myself busier and delude myself I am working harder.

And we are also a victim of our own success … the better we do our job … the longer people live and the more workload they put on the health and social care system.

So we have the perfect storm … the perfect recipe for chaos … slowly rising demand … slowly shrinking budgets … and an inefficient ‘business’ design.

And that in a nutshell is the reason the NHS is descending into chaos.

So what is the solution?

Reduce demand? Stop people getting sick? Or make them sicker so they die quicker?

Increase budgets? Where will the money come from? Beg? Borrow? Steal? Economic growth?

Improve the design? Now there’s a thought. But how? By using the same beliefs and behaviours that have created the current chaos?

Maybe we need to challenge some invalid beliefs and behaviours … and replace those that fail the Reality Test with some more effective ones.