PURPOSE – The purpose of this paper is to show how over the last 18 months Bolton Hospitals NHS Trust have been exploring whether or not lean methodologies, often known as the Toyota Production System, can indeed be applied to healthcare. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH – This paper is a viewpoint. FINDINGS – One’s...

In most hospitals, the amount of nursing time spent on actual patient care is only 33 %, while problem solving consumes 40 % of their time. That’s the bad news. The good news is that inverting this ratio may be easier than you think.  According to Dr John Kenagy and David Sundahl of the US-based Kenagy & Associates,...

Point-of-care testing (POCT) is one of the most rapidly growing areas within laboratory medicine. The need for POCT has developed because in many cases the central laboratory has been unable to meet the expectations of clinical users, particularly with respect to turnaround time. It is widely recognized that...