Improving and Sustaining New Initiatives: Practical Tools for Change

Most service improvements work for about six months. The enthusiasm fades, the person who drove it rotates, and the old process quietly returns because nothing was built to hold the new one in place.

Lean and Six Sigma tools that fit a clinical service, and the methods to make a change outlast the people who started it.

• Apply Lean and Six Sigma principles at a scale that fits a clinical service, rather than a manufacturing plant.
• Map a process and run root cause analysis to find where time, effort and goodwill are being lost.
• Build feedback from patients, service users and colleagues into the design, so the change solves the right problem.
• Measure impact in a way that survives scrutiny, using data you can realistically collect alongside clinical work.
• Plan for sustainability from the start, so the improvement holds when rotations change and attention moves elsewhere.