Healthcare is perhaps the most personal and important service people experience, yet is not a service that people necessarily seek (Berry and Bendapudi 2007). Although the focus tends towards the technical aspect of service provision, 'patient experience' transcends a purely medical and organisational perspective (Makarem and Al-Amin 2014). Providing healthcare services in an environment where patients are increasingly experience-aware and evertighter financial constraints prevail, presents challenges both for service design and performance in operations management (Zomerdijk and Voss 2010, Dey et al. 2013, Tax et al. 2013). This highlights the important role of operations strategy because it becomes the means by which a range of operations management initiatives can be defined and implemented within organisations (Hill and Hill 2011), including healthcare providers. 'Lean' is one of these operations management initiatives that has received significant attention from both practitioners and scholars within service environments (Panchak 2003,