Care by Design understands the fundamentals of organisational development, service management and leadership for the 21st century public sector organisation and communities.
Care by Design understands the fundamentals of organisational development, service management and leadership for the 21st century public sector organisation and communities.
Now that we are quite clear on what the true purpose of the service is, and what value looks like in the eyes of the patient, we then turn our attention to how much of this 'purpose and value' are we required to deliver on a daily/weekly/ monthly basis.
We use the words true demand to ensure that we are actually identifying the total demand for our service. For instance,
"The number of requests for a single service received each month"
is not the same as
"The number of requests received, plus the number of requests we didn't receive because patients gave up trying to get through to us"
(true demand is the sum of both these numbers, and it can at least be estimated)
It is important to go the extra mile when we are identifying demand, and not to take the easy way out by simply measuring the numbers that are visible to us at first sight. Taking the appropriate amount of time to think very carefully about demand and get it right is essential to the improvement effort.
When identifying demand it is useful to take this measure over time and pay attention to the past as well as current demand. We will then understand a bit more about the variation in demand over time and be able to predict future demand, within limits. As you will discover, we can find ways of reducing variation in demand and therefore predict the future with a greater degree of confidence.
Published 1st January 1970