LEA Door to Door Club member wins HSJ Best Acute Healthcare Organisation of the Year


After much deliberation the Judges chose Calderdale and Huddersfield describing them as “an extremely impressive and rounded organisation where care has been improved by focusing not just on safety but also on individual patient outcomes”.

The judging panel continued: “Calderdale and Huddersfield has shown a clear vision, excellent involvement and engagement with clinicians and a systematic application of improvement processes”.

We can only agree with the judge’s decision. Having worked with many healthcare organisations both across the UK and overseas we have noted that Calderdale and Huddersfield appear to be somewhat of an outlier compared to many in that, as opposed to regarding lean as an additional project, they rapidly integrate successful lean experiments into their mainstream management processes.

The Trust elected to join our Healthcare ‘Door to Door’ Club after firstly reading copies of our latest publication, the book, ‘Making Hospitals Work’ and then by sending key staff on our 2 day workshop based on the book.

Since joining the club they have, by employing just some of the initial processes laid out in the book, reduced the average Length of Stay (LoS) for Medical patients on their Huddersfield by 24.75% and by 40.42% for Emergency Surgical Patients in less than six months!!!! Whilst benefiting from a vast reduction in the variation in LoS. They have recently duplicated the same processes on their Calderdale site and expecting to enjoy improvements of a similar magnitude.

Tania King, our main point of contact and Service Improvement Lead for the organisation explained “The first secret weapon (and there are many more to come) that we’ve employed is what Ian and Marc call the Visual Hospital. Since implementing just the Visual Hospital across both our sites we have seen a significant reduction in length of stay which is being maintained.  Whilst I always had faith in the process I didn’t imagine the results would be so remarkable. We’re finally starting to achieve some stability in the patient flow processes in our hospitals”

May we take this opportunity to congratulate the Trust staff that made winning this award possible.