Patience is a virtue for an advocate of Improvementology®.
This week Mike Davidge (Head of Measurement for the former NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement) posted some feedback on the Journal of Improvement Science site.
His feedback is reproduced here in full with Mike’s permission. The rationale for reproduction that the activity data shows that more people the Blog than the Journal.
Feedback posted on 15/06/2013 at 07:35:05 for paper entitled:
Dodds S. A Case Study of a Successful One-Stop Clinic Schedule Design using Formal Methods . Journal of Improvement Science 2012:6; 1-13.
“It’s only taken me a year to get round to reading this, an improvement on your 9 years to write it! It was well worth the read. You should make a serious attempt to publish this where it gets a wider audience. Rank = 5/5”
Mike is a world expert in healthcare system measurement and improvement so this is a huge compliment. Thank you Mike. He is right too – 1 year is a big improvement on 9 years. So why did it take 9 years to write up?
One reason is that publication was not the purpose. Improvement was the purpose. Another reason was that this was a step in a bigger improvement project – one that is described in Three Wins. There is a third reason: the design flaws of the traditional academic peer review process. This is radical stuff and upsets a lot of people so we need to be careful.
The two primary design flaws of conventional peer-reviewed academic journals are:
1) that it has a long lead time and
2) that it has a low yield.
So it is very expensive in author-lifetime. Improvement is not the same as research. Perfection is not the goal. Author lifetime is a very valuable resource. If it is wasted with an inefficient publication process design then the result is less output and less dissemination of valuable Improvement Science.
So if any visitors would like to benefit from Mike’s recommendation then you can download the full text of the essay here. It has not been peer-reviewed so you will have to make you own minds up about the value. And if you have any questions then you are free to ask the author.
PS. The visitor who points out the most spelling and grammar errors will earn themselves a copy of BaseLine© the time-series analysis software used to create the charts.