Comments

Thanks for these Cathy - excellent.

Tom – please, please please, get to talk to Chief Executives in the NHS (500 or so would be a good start!!) with a similar presentation. They need you desperately - even if they don’t know it yet.

Do us all a favour by reminding them that healthcare is actually about front line staff and patients and NOT about ‘ticking boxes’ to record whether or not they have hit meaningless targets. My doctor friend always says – and I agree – NHS management is so busy chasing targets it’s missing the point. … Oh …. and by the way NHS management systems are creating a paper mountain though those activity reports that no one reads which means of course we have to recruit many more accountants and process managers to manage these highly ineffective processes. Yours cynically …..

BTW - NONE of this stuff is adding value to the patient experience. The answer is to give more power to the front line staff.

Posted by Trevor Gay at March 13, 2007 11:04 AM

PS .. However .... the sun is shining gloriously and spring has clearly arived early here in England - it's great to be alive :-)

Posted by Trevor Gay at March 13, 2007 11:06 AM

1. " ... gloriously ... " for you perhaps Trevor considering you fleeced NHS like an Australian [Richard] sheepherder for 35 years ...

2. ... with ALL $25M fleece going to your Zurich "front-liner" accounts ... meanwhile NHS true front-liners begged for watery gruel each day in their windowless basement cafeterias ...

Posted by sean_zurich at March 13, 2007 12:36 PM

Latest news on quiet TP BLog day ....

Richard and Trevor setting up new virtual company 'Minimalist Lifestle Inc.' with Sean_Zurich 'bought in' as advisor on accumulating wealth at the expense of frontliners.

Posted by Trevor Gay at March 13, 2007 5:03 PM

Looks like a great presentation Tom. So many of the basic elements of healthcare are broken. It is probably a safe bet that the reason there have only been incremental gains in healththcare processes and treatments is due to only benchmarking the current infrastructure and state of affairs in the search for improvements.

Can you imagine the healthcare industry funding a zero based design project. A totally clean sheet of paper to design the healthcare experience from strictly a patient and physician perspective. What would it look like if they would take the time to design the processes, buildings, work-flow etc., to give patients the best care, physicians the best information access? What would it look like if they designed hospitals and all the support systems with the stakeholders (patients,families, nurses, physicians, clinicians, janitors, pharmacists) in mind? No one has done it, but the industry should fund a project like this. Lifetree it appears is trying, but again they are adding services and benefits on top of the existing infrastructure.

How can they afford not to start over with costs and care totally out of control. Trying to fix a system that has evolved with myriad incremental gains over the last 100 years is probably impossible.

It is time to start over.

Posted by Tom at Proteus at March 14, 2007 11:50 AM

I think the presentation is going to be awesome.
I've heard of your work before and I can now say that i'm a fan.

Posted by solay at March 14, 2007 3:33 PM