Jem Ramazanoglu's activity
In group: Quality Management in Healthcare
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Jem Ramazanoglu posted an update in the group Quality Management in Healthcare 7 months, 1 week ago
What is the difference between a clinical pathway and a process when it comes to process management?
If we are going to effectively implement process management, is there a need to differentiate these terms? I have found a lot of clinical pathways which appear to be processes at first glance, but which sometimes miss some key process steps when it comes to defining what needs to happen to follow a pathway. It seems like there is no standard way of developing a pathway document and that there is a lot of variation in the level of detail that is included.
Would it be sensible to aim to have clinical pathways as high level documents which describe the ideal patient journey, use process documents to underpin the pathway, describing the tasks to be undertaken and then SOPs/standard work to provide operational instructions for how to perform specific tasks?
Has anyone looked into this? Keen to avoid re-inventing the wheel…
Clinical Pathways and Process Management are different and there is a need to differentiate the terms. However they are intrinsically interlinked.
Your explanation of a clinical pathways as an ideal patient journey, and processes the actual underpinning mechanism to deliver the pathway is a very good one. I do believe that a redesign of a pathway must be done with an analysis of the processes to ensure that processes and efficient and effective to actual deliver the pathway. The processes may need to be re-engineered to actually achieve an optimised pathway.
I have done some work on this and would be happy to discuss it with you.
Thanks Tegid. I’d love a chat about your work. Please let me know when is good for you. Email me at j.ramazanoglu@nhs.net
Thanks,
Jem
Certainly there is no point in adding an activity into a pathway if that activity is not available. I guess that proposed new pathways may require new activities and therefor processes to be developed.
Process relates to a specific work group within a specific department in a specific Trust and details work activities specific to that workgroup. Better practice from a workgroup can and should be shared within Trusts and across Trusts.
Clinical pathways offer information and guidance to a range of people from clinicians to managers to patients and should not include specific process detail. Clinical pathways are often described as the patient pathway or patient journey. A useful planning tool for capacity and bottleneck calculations. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_pathway Plus lots of info. On the Internet.
Pathway detail can change independently to process and visa versa.