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.
When we look at how work moves through a process we often see that it progresses in a 'stop/start' way, that it does not occur in a smooth, continuous flow from the start of the process to the end. Typically, for "departmental efficiency" reasons, one group of people will carry out a part of the service and the work will then be passed on to a second group. Here the work may wait, and build up, until this group is ready to deal with it. The work may then be passed on to the third group of people, and so on to the end of the process.
When patients request a service from us they want it delivered, to their satisfaction, in the quickest time possible. They do not want to have their request "batched up" with other patients' requests and therefore waiting to be processed. They want their request to keep moving. Making workflow through a process in a smooth, uninterrupted way, is definitely an improvement from the patient's point of view.
From our point of view also, things work better when all of the activities needed to provide a service to occur in a continuous flow, without interruption. At first sight, we sometimes find this difficult to believe – until we try it. It is a conversion from departmental thinking to service stream thinking.
For an example of how to improve service by making the workflow, click here.
Published 1st January 1970