The problem

Leeds Teaching Hospitals needs to support each clinical service unit (CSU) to deliver a service wide ’waste week’ to identify waste, develop improvement plans to remove waste and add value, because otherwise there will be gaps in our ability to create a culture of continuous improvement at Leeds.

The challenge

• How might we spotlight waste removal so that CSU’s see/keep waste removal as a top priority?
• How might we educate teams in waste removal activities so that they can identify waste?
• How might we educate teams so that they remove the root cause of their waste as opposed to implementing work-arounds?
• How might we educate teams around the use of improvement tools so that they can remove their own waste?
• How might we support individual teams in the development of their annual ‘finance the Leeds way’ improvement plan so that they have a documented SMART and realistic approach to improvement delivery?
• How might we overcome the stance that we have removed all the waste it is possible to remove so that we continue to embed a culture of continuous improvement?
• How might we educate our teams around different aspects of implementing changes and how to overcome resistance to change so that they are set up for success, able to make and sustain their changes?
• How might leaders have sight of the improvements that teams want to make so that we can support them and remove barriers and challenges?
• How might we educate teams to understand the importance of setting a psychologically safe environment so that people feel safe to share issues, ideas and are empowered to make changes?
• How might we support teams to do this together so that this is a true collative process?

The outputs

• Improved focus on waste reduction in the finance CSU
• Improved levels of education around identifying waste and how to remove it.
• Increased awareness in teams of why people resist change and how to overcome that.
• Increased collaboration among teams
• Increased empowerment of teams to remove waste and improve their work

The outcomes

The benefits to the trust experienced as a result of the innovation implemented were:

• A minimum of five ideas from each team on areas they can improve over the next year which are written into teams’ improvement plans for next year.
• An increased amount of standard work created, which will ensure can set up new starters well and remove variation and mistakes from our work.
• Further sessions on mental valleys with individual teams is planned to keep the work going
• A collection of mental valleys captured in the sessions that the senior leaders can use to have further conversations with teams and base future improvements around.