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Vol 31 - No 07 - November/December 2005 Clinical Patient Pathways – a Case Study This case study presents the application of Clinical Patient Pathway Analysis to help a large hospital achieve the Government’s 31 and 62-day cancer waiting times. The project succeeded in identifying a number of underlying issues within the patient pathway and made recommendations that have the potential to reduce the overall patient pathway cycle time by 86% to 21 days. Demand for services from the NHS is much more predictable than generally perceived, however, queues, blockages and long waiting times exist because they have been unwittingly designed into the system. Sometimes, the underlying reason is based on the people on the ground responding to a target or pressure and optimising a local process without really understanding the whole healthcare delivery system. In other cases the variation has come about because of the evolutionary nature of healthcare that produces pockets of clinical brilliance in turn offset by poor support systems that have failed to evolve as rapidly as the medicine. Page number: 19 Word count: 3300 Related Topics: Advanced Planning and Scheduling Health
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