Evolution is an amazing process.
Using the same building blocks that have been around for a lot time, it cooks up innovative permutations and combinations that reveal new and ever more useful properties.
Very often a breakthrough in understanding comes from a simplification, not from making it more complicated.
Knowledge evolves in just the same way.
Sometimes a well understood simplification in one branch of science is used to solve an ‘impossible’ problem in another.
Cross-fertilisation of learning is a healthy part of the evolution process.
Improvement implies evolution of knowledge and understanding, and then application of that insight in the process of designing innovative ways of doing things better.
And so it is in healthcare. For many years the emphasis on healthcare improvement has been the Safety-and-Quality dimension, and for very good reasons. We need to avoid harm and we want to achieve happiness; for everyone.
But many of the issues that plague healthcare systems are not primarily SQ issues … they are flow and productivity issues. FP. The safety and quality problems are secondary – so only focussing on them is treating the symptoms and not the cause. We need to balance the wheel … we need flow science.
Fortunately the science of flow is well understood … outside healthcare … but apparently not so well understood inside healthcare … given the queues, delays and chaos that seem to have become the expected norm. So there is a big opportunity for cross fertilisation here. If we choose to make it happen.
For example, from computer science we can borrow the knowledge of how to schedule tasks to make best use of our finite resources and at the same time avoid excessive waiting.
It is a very well understood science. There is comprehensive theory, a host of techniques, and fit-for-purpose tools that we can pick of the shelf and use. Today if we choose to.
So what are the reasons we do not?
Is it because healthcare is quite introspective?
Is it because we believe that there is something ‘special’ about healthcare?
Is it because there is no evidence … no hard proof … no controlled trials?
Is it because we assume that queues are always caused by lack of resources?
Is it because we do not like change?
Is it because we do not like to admit that we do not know stuff?
Is it because we fear loss of face?
Whatever the reasons the evidence and experience shows that most (if not all) the queues, delays and chaos in healthcare systems are iatrogenic.
This means that they are self-generated. And that implies we can un-self-generate them … at little or no cost … if only we knew how.
The only cost is to our egos of having to accept that there is knowledge out there that we could use to move us in the direction of excellence.
New meat for our old bones?