Fad or panacea - Lean management

Abstract

The NHS will need to make real term cost savings whilst maintaining and, where possible, enhancing the quality of essential services. The require-ment for efficiency savings to enable reinvestment in quality is estimated to be up to £21.1 billion by 2014 (Department of Health, 2010; Appleby, 2009.). This requires the NHS to increase productivity by 6 percent per annum (Appleby, 2010) while the Office of National Statistics estimates that productivity1 actually fell by approximately 0.3 percent per annum over the period 1995-2008 (ONS, 2010). Productivity is highly variable within the NHS and even within trusts (NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, 2004). Given these pressures, the productivity of healthcare organiza-tions is an incredibly salient topic; lean management is a particular pertinent and topical issue.