Research pick: Leaning in to improve healthcare - "Factors promoting value creation in lean management within public social and healthcare organisation"

Research in the International Journal of Services and Operations Management has shown that the success of lean management techniques in public healthcare depends not only on the tools used to implement it, but on a fundamental shift in organisational culture. Lean management has proved itself able to reduce waste and improve efficiency across the public and private sectors. This work, by Petra Hurme and Johanna Liljeroos-Cork of Tampere University, Finland, emphasises the need to encourage long-term collaboration and improve staff well-being to make it work well in the healthcare sector.

Lean management is designed to maximise value by eliminating waste, often by streamlining processes, reducing waiting times between steps in a process, and generally improving the allocation of resources. In public healthcare settings, early applications of the lean approach have led to positive outcomes, such as enhanced service delivery, improved staff satisfaction, and even cost savings. However, within this sector, many organisations have not reaped the rewards or gained only temporary or superficial improvements.

The research looked at several healthcare and social service organisations and found that transient and superficial benefits of lean in those settings were often down to a failure to change the organisation’s internal culture in order to embraces more fully the principles of lean to allow staff to engage in ongoing improvements. The team suggests that leaders need to prioritise the development of an environment that is supportive of staff where they will experience greater job satisfaction and be happier. When employees are emotionally engaged and feel included in decision-making, they are better able to drive the changes necessary to improve services, it seems.

One of the critical findings of the research is that organisations and management need to redefine how value is measured in this sector. It is not solely about operational efficiency as it might be in a factory where working more efficiently and faster towards greater profit are important. Instead, healthcare value should also be understood in terms of how well the service meets the needs and expectations of patients and service users and how well it treats its staff.

Hurme, P. and Liljeroos-Cork, J. (2024) ‘Factors promoting value creation in lean management within public social and healthcare organisation’, Int. J. Services and Operations Management, Vol. 49, No. 5, pp.1–21.