Thomas John Rose's activity
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Thomas John Rose posted an update in the group Philosophy and ethics for health care improvement 6 months, 4 weeks ago
Did anyone read my comments on the ‘Keeping scepticism alive in health care improvement’ blog? I think that a really interesting and valuable (particularly in terms of ‘quality’) discussion regarding the difference between service (product) and process. In addition to these two aspects there is the input from the clinician. These three elements/aspects (not sure of the right word to use here) are what results in the quality of the service to the patient. Once these have been defined in healthcare then we can start to improve each of them. They need to be defined first as the techniques for improving each will be different. What about synergy? I’d love this discussion.
In terms of service VS process, I’d say in the NHS we operationally tend to think about all at the same time, the processes needed to deliver the care, the clinical decision points and the actual care, both for individual patients and as a system serving many patients. We do also look at just the experience of patients as ‘touchpoints’ often involving patients, and then identify what patients want, and then adapt processes to deliver what patients want. In addition there are times when we would look at the work flow of clinicians (across patients) for process improvement.
Can you provide a health example that explains why you think the NHS would benefit from dissecting these further Tom?
As you stated above ‘in the NHS we operationally tend to think about all at the same time’, as a result there are NO good examples from the NHS that explain why I think the NHS would benefit from dissecting these further. But – after almost 50 years as an active member of the UKs Chartered Quality Institute (CQI) and a number of years as a Fellow of the UKs Institute For Continuous Improvement In Public Services (ICIPS) + BSc, MSc, MBA and PhD all in relevant areas and 8 years experience of working with the NHS on top of a long career in improvement. are good enough reason for ME to think that the NHS would benefit from dissecting these further.