DIABETES - WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
That’s a big question, certainly when you consider the NHS...
I have been sat at my desk and I’ve been
stretching my mind back to my MBA days, a having a look at a few of my books
about problem identification. They talk
about three types of problems:
- Routine problems that we have seen before and already solved, just do it all again
- Problems where we have ‘less than adequate information’
- Complex and ambiguous.
NHS problems mostly fall into the third
category, and the most difficult are referred to as ‘wicked’ problems.
So what do we do about these ‘wicked’
diabetes questions...
My view is to think as small as possible. I
can see now my business tutors talking about kaizen – the theory of continuous
improvement. This is not about disruptive innovations rather incremental steps
which are generally led by the shop floor via ‘quality circles’. Out of
interest Maverick[1] by
Ricardo Semler is an interesting read on this subject. So with these ‘wicked’
diabetes problems lets start small with the
Spirit family of companies which run three GP practices. VanGundy suggest the following process[2]
Certainly, for NHS problems I think there
is a precursor stage in this process and that is gathering information.
So that is where we are going to start. We will look at national and local guidance and compare that to the reality of day to day practice. We are going to present this information in the form of a patient pathway. Where possible, we are going to provide evidence for the ‘day to day’ pathway from Hospital Episode Statistics and from GP systems.
I will keep you posted as we progress
through the project. If you want to hear
more about what we are up to, or have specific questions, please feel free to
get in touch.
To find out more or get an update on progress of our diabetes project, contact us on SpiritAccess.Enquiries@spirit-healthcare.co.uk.
[1] Semler R, Maverick, Arrow books, 2007
[2] VanGundy, Arthur B ;
Techniques of Structured Problem Solving; Von Nostrand Reinhold; 1980