Can Six Sigma be the “cure” for our “ailing” NHS?

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to analyse whether Six Sigma business strategy can be used to improve the financial and operational performance of the NHS. The paper will also look at some of the major challenges and barriers in the implementation of this powerful process improvement strategy within the healthcare sector.Design/methodology/approachThis paper discusses whether Six Sigma DMAIC methodology can be a useful and disciplined approach to tackle process‐ and quality‐related problems in the NHS.FindingsThe paper presents some key findings from other researchers in the field, followed by some comments on whether Six Sigma is a useful approach to be considered by the NHS for cost reduction and defect reduction strategies.Originality/valueThe paper illustrates the point that Six Sigma is not confined just to manufacturing industry, rather it is equally applicable to service industry, especially the healthcare and financial sectors. The application of Six Sigma in the UK health sector is relatively new and the purpose of the paper is to increase the awareness of this powerful business strategy in healthcare discipline.

Six Sigma Practices and Organizational Performance in Malaysian Healthcare Industry

“…Antony et al [23] discovered that SS practices can improve customer performance in healthcare industry. Habidin [4] interpreted understanding need, information and data from customers will give benefits to organization to produce high quality product or service, improving productivity and increase the profitability.…”

Money matters: exploiting the data from outcomes research for quality improvement initiatives

“…If the same performance were ''translated'' into the credit card industry, banks would deposit 36 millions checks in the wrong account, and airplane crashes would rise 100-fold. For these reasons, the methodology has attracted increasing attention in the health care sector in the last 10 years and its use is growing [22,23,[41][42][43][44][45]. Six-sigma has been successfully applied in various health care areas such as: radiology, to improve the through-put and thereby reduce the costs per radiology procedure; Supply Chain Management for surgical supplies, to reduce the inventory levels and improve supplier relationships; Emergency Departments, to address the problem of overcrowding, by reducing the time required to transfer patients from the Emergency Department to an inpatient bed and to achieve pain management; laboratory diagnostics, to decrease the analytical errors; infection control, to reduce post-operative and catheterization infections; and heart failure, to reduce the variations in outcomes, length of stay and treatment [45,46].…”

“…The estimated hard cash saving of these improvement initiatives ranged from 60,000 to about 1 million US dollars per year. Overall, the 6-r methodology has been advocated as a potentially effective quality method through which it should be possible to improve the health care system both in terms of the quality of the care provided and cost reduction [23,[45][46][47][48].…”

“…There is general consensus that an improvement in the quality of a service can be attained with the active cooperation of all the operators [23,29,45,64,65]. The need for a value-based competition market to improve quality will increase the necessity to incorporate industry-derived methods in health care.…”

“…It aims to stimulate research groups to better understand that, by adopting a slightly different perspective, their studies can be an additional resource for the healthcare provider. Given the current quest for well established improvement methods in health care [23,27,45], the research staff represent an ideal door through which advanced quality improvement methodologies such as the 6-r can enter the health care environment.…”