Making Healthcare Lean

A conference like no other you have attended. For the first time those involved in taking lean into healthcare across the world are coming together to brainstorm what a lean future for healthcare will look like. The fact that almost every one of the experts I invited immediately said they were enthusiastic to come, tells me that The First Global Lean Healthcare Summit on 25-26 June is timely (http://www.leanuk.org/pages/lean_summit.htm). It also gave me a challenging juggling act to fit them all into the programme.

In my experience the early wins from creating flow through value streams in hospitals will not be sustained unless we go further to build the right kind of leadership and management systems to manage what are collections of processes that need careful synchronisation, and the right kind of support from supply chain partners.

For the first time we are bringing the whole industry together - connecting pioneering lean stories in hospitals with similar stories from the supply industry feeding the healthcare system. Enriched by insights into leading lean transformations in two of the best lean examples in the UK, Unipart in distribution and Tesco in retailing.

This is not an awareness raising conference, but a chance for those really interested in lean healthcare to join a serious and structured brainstorming and vision sharing exercise. This will begin with briefing papers ahead of the conference and a summary of the discussions afterwards. Our objective is that every delegate will go away from the Summit with their own action plan and vision.

The best way to gain most from this very rich material is to bring a group of colleagues with you, who can continue to implement lean together after the Summit. For this reason we are offering groups a discount - bring five and only pay for four, bring ten and only pay for eight etc.

Attending The First Global Lean Healthcare Summit will probably be the best investment you will make in your lean journeys this year. We look forward to seeing you in June. If you have any further questions do not hesitate to contact us at LEA.

Best wishes
Professor Daniel T Jones 

P.S. LEA has taken this initiative on behalf of our Lean Global Network of 12 lean institutes across the world. Interest in lean healthcare is now global and it will be a truely global summit. Please alert anyone you know who might be interested in coming.