Health services under siege: the case for clinical process redesign.

*Public health services are struggling to cope with rising demand. *Strain on health services manifests as longer waiting lists for surgery, queuing in the emergency departments, increased rates of adverse events, and delays in discharge, particularly for older patients. *Traditional responses are not resolving these problems.

Redesigning care at the Flinders Medical Centre: clinical process redesign using "lean thinking".

*The Flinders Medical Centre (FMC) Redesigning Care program began in November 2003; it is a hospital-wide process improvement program applying an approach called "lean thinking" (developed in the manufacturing sector) to health care. *To date, the FMC has involved hundreds of staff from all areas of the hospital in a wide variety of process redesign activities. *The initial focus of the program was on improving the flow of patients through the emergency department, but the program quickly spread to involve the redesign of managing medical and surgical patients throughout the hospital, and to improving major support services.