Table 1.
Characteristics of the hospitals taking part in the pathway improvement project.
Figure 1.
Schematic representation of the Lean Six Sigma methodology used in the care pathway improvent project.
Figure 2.
Example of summary chart of patients' journeys in a single hospital.
The horizontal axis represents time; patient entry is marked with the black box on the far right. Each coloured square is a visit or diagnostic test. A list of the possible diagnostic tests is shown in the legend on upper right. Shaded squares represent discharge. As can be seen, the sequence of each patient journey is different and the waiting times are long and vary greatly between patients.
Table 2.
Mean number of diagnostic tests, diagnostic yields and median times to diagnosis in the overall study group and at the individual participating hospitals before and after implementation of new pathways.
Figure 3.
Example of impact of the new diagnostic processes for blackout/syncope at the Victoria Hospital Blackpool.
Number of tests (left-hand graph) and visits (right-hand graph) are shown before and after implementation of the new processes.
Figure 4.
Two representative examples of patient journeys before and after implementation of Lean Six Sigma derived syncope pathways at Victoria Hospital Blackpool.
Red diamonds indicate points on the patient journey before the implementation of new pathways; green triangles show points on the journey with the new pathways structured after the Lean SIx Sigma project. Events in the patient journey and performed tests are noted in the boxes.
Table 3.
Tests performed before and after implementation of the new pathways at the Victoria Hospital Blackpool.