ASiT - can

Welcome to ASiT - can.  You are the leaders and mangers of the future!

The National Health Service is now over 60 years old.  However, the way we have delivered our practice over that time has not changed and the plant in which we operate is much the same.  A consultant of 1948 would not feel out of place in a hospital in 2011. We continue to tinker and fix the noun “health” but we have not focused on the operative word “service”. 

Service is summarized in the 6 E’s’

• Efficacy
  - Do the Means work?
• Efficiency
  - Amount of work divided by the resources
• Effectiveness
  - Is it meeting the long term aim?
  - What is our failure rate over time?
• Experience
  - Is the patient delighted?
• Ethical
• Elegant

We can and should go further.  We need to benchmark ourselves with industries outside the health sector - for example the service sector.  We are all customers in our every day life.  We understand what is good and bad service.  The customer value equation is easily adapted for health care.  It is defined as Quality divided by Cost.

Surgeons are very good at defining short term outcomes as part of the audit process - tick.  The other highlighted areas of the patient value equation are also within our remit as clinicians. Change will not come from top down control but from within our societies and ourselves.  We have to want to do it - a realisation by all clinicians that we can and should design a better service by putting our patients at the centre of our endeavours is required.  We need to design services that meet the challenges of the future.

Quality is not what we put into the health service, but what the patient gets out of it.  It is defined by both short and long term outcomes as well as the quality of the process. The process factors include the flow (Patient Care Pathway).   The Quality of delivery is defined in the term service.  Do we serve our patients with all that it entails?  The delivery and timing that does not directly improve the flow of the patient through the system is referred to as non - value added waste.  This impacts on the patient and this cost is largely invisible.  It is the cost of inconvenience, the cost of time, waits, delays and distress caused by a service that is not necessarily designed with them in mind.
 
UKAN is a live network of doctors with a passion for management and leadership in the UK’s NHS and wider healthcare systems. If you are interested in improving service delivery and realising the business of health care and you are keen to have a stronger voice in the development of healthcare policy and determined to develop your own understanding, skills and knowledge of management and leadership – UKAN is for you. Here you will meet other doctors with whom you can share your experience, worries, successes and skills. Here you can learn from colleagues in an informal environment.  In the future we hope to be able to consolidate the learning into management modules that help you develop.  We hope to stimulate you to think about the business of health care and perhaps contemplate formal learning in this area.

We will ask you to introduce yourself the first time you post on a particular section. To join our network you simply need to sign up, provide your GMC number and place of work, so that we can verify that you are a medical practitioner in the UK – and then begin to make your contribution to – and learn from – the network. 

We look forward to getting to know you – and to your help in developing UKAN [you can]

David J. O’Regan
MBA MD FRCS C-Th
david_o_regan@hotmail.com
Twitter :@David_ukan
Linkedin : www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=24127006&trk=tab_pro

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