NHS Waiting Times
There was a report yesterday that said that some NHS Trusts are imposing a minimum and maximum waiting time for some operations and treatment to save money.
If they are they, they are breaking the First Law of Scheduling, which is you maximise your efficiency by agreeing dates between both parties as soon as you can.
I first came across this, when I worked in the Research Department of ICI at Runcorn. We had a small workshop that would make equipment you needed. Everybody used to put a delivery date of ASAP on everything, even if they didn’t want it for a month or so. The outcome was that nothing got delivered in a reasonable time.
The situation couldn’t go on and the manager of the workshop decided that no work would be accepted without an agreed delivery date.
The outcome was harmony and everybody was happy. One interesting side effect of this method, was that when the workshop could see a high peak of future work, they would sub-contract some jobs to an external firm.
I must admit that I stole this technique when I wrote the task scheduler for Artemis, but of course this was a legitimate steal and it made the task scheduler very good.
Some NHS Trusts do use this agreeing of appointments method. Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge do and I’ve negotiated a suitable date and time on the phone several times.
I know too of a farmer, who needed a hip replacement and got the operation done at one of the quietest times in the farming year and a slack time for Ipswich Hospital.
Now most of us have e-mail or can use SMS, surely this negotiation can be an almost painless and automatic process.
It oviously won’t work for emergencies, but say you need something like a hip replacement, a mutually convenient date is best for all parties and in my view will probably add a few percentage points to hospital capacity.
How many NHS Trusts still manage appointments and waiting lists on a non-scientific basis.
The Anonymous Widower 
[…] we might be back to the ASAP scheduling problem, I highlighted in the post on NHS waiting times. Take say the problem of ordering goods, just before you go away for a holiday. You might like to […]
Pingback by A Too Good Delivery System Causes Problems « The Anonymous Widower | August 1, 2011 |