{"id":6047,"date":"2021-01-04T19:51:07","date_gmt":"2021-01-04T18:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.improvementscience.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6047"},"modified":"2021-05-04T06:20:48","modified_gmt":"2021-05-04T06:20:48","slug":"no-queue-vaccination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/?p=6047","title":{"rendered":"No Queue Vaccination"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Vaccinating millions of vulnerable people in the middle of winter requires a safe, efficient and effective process.<\/p>\n

It is not safe to have queues of people waiting outside in the freezing cold.\u00a0 It is not safe to have queues of people packed into an indoor waiting area.<\/p>\n

It is not safe to have queues full stop.<\/p>\n

And let us face it, the NHS is not brilliant at avoiding queues.<\/p>\n

My experience is that the commonest cause of queues in health care processes something called the Flaw of Averages<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This is where patients are booked to arrive at an interval equal to the average rate they can be done.<\/p>\n

For example, suppose I can complete 15 vaccinations in an hour … that is one every 4 minutes on average … so common sense tells me it that the optimum way to book patients for their jab is one every four minutes.\u00a0 Yes?<\/p>\n

Actually, No.\u00a0 That is the perfect design for generating a queue – and the reason is because, in reality, patients don’t arrive exactly on time, and they don’t arrive at exactly one every three minutes, and\u00a0 there will be variation in exactly how long it takes me to do each jab, and unexpected things will happen.\u00a0 In short, there are lots of sources of variation.\u00a0 Some random and some not.\u00a0 And just that variation is enough to generate a predictably unpredictable queue.\u00a0 A chaotic queue.<\/p>\n

The Laws of Physics decree it.<\/p>\n

\n

So, to illustrate the principles of creating a No Queue design here are some videos of a simulated mass vaccination process.<\/p>\n

The process is quite simple – there are three steps that every patient must complete in sequence:<\/p>\n

1) Pre-Jab Safety Check – Covid Symptoms + Identity + Clinical Check.
\n2) The Jab.
\n3) Post-Jab Safety Check (15 minutes of observation … just-in-case).<\/p>\n

And the simplest layout of a sequential process is a linear one with the three steps in sequence.<\/p>\n

So, let’s see what happens.<\/p>\n