Overview

2009 Health Care Summit

For information about the current summit, plus poster presentations from the 2008 summit, please see Health Care Summit.

Background

The Redesigning Care program was initiated at Flinders Medical Centre (FMC) during the winter of 2003. The main aim was to address the increasing demand for emergency services and elective surgery in the hospital.

FMC soon became one of the first hospitals in Australia to use lean thinking to redesign hospital processes across the whole spectrum of clinical care. For further information about interventions undertaken by Redesigning Care, see our fact sheets.

Six simple rules for redesigning care

• see things through the patient’s eyes
• find a better way of doing things
• look at the whole picture
• respect the ideas and work of others
• give frontline staff the time and tools to tackle the problem
• take small steps as well as big leaps

Four years on..

• we have absorbed ever-increasing levels of demand without compromising the quality of care provided
• more patients are being seen and admitted to hospital than ever before
• long waits in the Emergency Department (ED) have dramatically declined
• the hospital is performing well on safety indicators such as adherence to triage times
• we are performing exceptionally on the acceptability of ED services (as demonstrated by waiting times)
• our capacity to undertake elective surgery has been restored
• we are a safer hospital, with a dramatic decline in serious adverse events
• we continue to attract and retain medical and nursing staff despite intense competition

Interventions and improvements

For further information about interventions the Redesigning Care Team have undertaken so far, please see Intervention and Improvement Register - pdf (170Kb) and Intervention Register 2006-2007 - pdf (200Kb)

For further information about improving the patient journey, please see improving the patient journey - pdf (464Kb) and Flinders Medical Centre: a world-leader in Redesigning Care - pdf (298Kb)

Contact details
Ph:	(08) 8204 6260
Fax:	(08) 8204 6261
email:	HEALTH.FMCRedesigningCare@health.sa.gov.au