Operational Management in Health & Social Care Essay

Operational Management in Health & Social Care - Essay Example As the report declares TPS way of thinking is largely influenced by the thinking of Edwards Deming, the quality guru who taught, among other thoughts, that managers should stop their reliance on mass inspection as a way of achieving quality and instead embed quality in the production process and the product in the first instance. Essentially, â€Å"lean† means doing more with less by eliminating or at least limiting the waste of time and resources. Lean thinking is a management strategy that applies to all organizations, including health care organizations, because the concept has to do with the improvement of processes. Every organization has in place a series of processes intended to create value for its customers. The central idea in lean thinking is to scrutinize an organization’s processes with the aim of discerning between the processes that add value to the customer and those that do not and are, therefore, wasteful.  This paper stresses that lean thinking is o ften associated with manufacturing business organizations, not health care where the wastage of time, supplies and money are rampant. However, the principles of lean thinking can work in health care just as they do in manufacturing; this paper demonstrates how by analysing two healthcare organizations that successfully applied lean management to reduce cost and wastage and improve service delivery. The analysis is preceded by an overview of the key concepts of lean management.