Use and Misuse of Takt Time in Services
I had an interesting discussion about takt time not so long ago and I have been mulling over what was said regarding the use of takt time in service organisations. Firstly, what is takt time? Well ‘takt’ is a German word meaning ‘rhythm’ or ‘drum-beat’. Takt time describes the average time between every instance of [...]
Targets in A&E make people cheat
A couple of days ago I wrote about an analysis of Accident and Emergency department (A&E) waiting times that the NHS Information Centre released. It showed that a disproportionate number of patients were seen to in the 10 minutes before the 4 hours waiting time target. The Nursing Times ran a survey in response to [...]
Inspectors under fire
In The Guardian today, Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) has come under fire from its former Chief Inspector, Sir Mike Tomlinson, “Inspection systems that rely too heavily on data and tick-box systems is not what we need. I worry we are heading that way.” It was Ofsted who was accused [...]
More on 4 hour target in A&E
The Times Online has an article about the 4 hour target data that I wrote about last time. In the article, Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association’s consultants’ committee, said that the admission rates were worrying. “This suggests that when patients have been waiting close to four hours, there is a rush to [...]
A&E targets distort behaviour
Yesterday the NHS Information Centre published a further analysis of the time that patients wait in Accident and Emergency departments before being seen to. The analysis showed that just before the 4 hour target, there is a huge peak of people being admitted to hospital. See the graph below from the report. The rising peak [...]
London Health 09 conference
On Monday and Tuesday this week I attended the London Health 09 conference. Day one was focused on local government and social care and day two on improving health outcomes for London. All in all it was a very useful two days and it highlighted some really good things that are being done and also [...]
Total Place – integrated public services or more cost cutting?
Total Place is a scheme to join-up public services in an area or a city. Trials have been run in Kent and Birmingham. It may be useful to read the report of the Total Place Roundtable in The Guardian since I will reference some comments from it there. The sub-title of the article is: Total [...]
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