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Why So Many of Healthcare’s Fixes Fail to ‘Stick’

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Featured Author:

Julie Wright

Julie Wright is the Senior Consultant for TOCH (Theories of Constraints for Healthcare – a scientific-based series of theories") that is focused on delivering the improvements made possible by applying the ToC (Theories of Constraints) to the Healthcare industry worldwide.

She has worked in both the manufacturing and retail industry before working as an Admissions Manager in a NHS hospital in order to fully research the healthcare system, focusing on the universal problem of bed shortages of healthcare systems.

This culminated in the publishing of the business novel, We All Fall Down which has been very well received within the international healthcare community including a published review in the New England Journal Of Medicine by Dr. Stephen G. Pauker. We All Fall Down is currently being translated into Japanese for use by the Japanese Ministry of Work to improve their healthcare system.

More articles from this author:

• Widgets, Walking Sticks or Weddings?
• Medics as Managers?
• Nursing Management

Over the years, the subject of success has held a fascination for me. This, along with my almost obsessive desire to understand how things work, has led me to a strange hobby – trying to determine what people have done to be successful.

This odd pastime first started to emerge some years ago when I was employed by a large UK retail outfit. The company had been through some bad years and a new CEO was parachuted in from mainland Europe to save the day. On first viewing his track record, it looked very impressive and soon the company was buzzing with tales of the success he’d had, at a very young age, in turning around a failing organization. After the obligatory press releases and hand shakes, my hobby antennae took over and it was relatively easy to discover the moves our new CEO had taken to reach our beleaguered corner of the retail world.

In his early 30’s, he had spectacularly engineered the turnaround of a major European company and some 18 years or so later he was being brought in to rescue us. I was interested in discovering successes he’d had since his stellar rise of his early years and why the board thought that his talents were worth almost 20 times that of an average employee.

On further investigation I was able to see a pattern in his career. In the many companies he had been employed by since his rise to fame, none had ever experienced the astonishing recovery of his first triumph but he was still able to demand and secure major personal financial packages to work his particular brand of magic with a string of employers. I needed to know why and so began my strange hobby.

On further investigation, it emerged that our would-be saviour’s early success was due to his restructuring of a distribution network that served a nationwide network of retail outlets. Since his early success, he moved from corporation to corporation implementing almost the same strategy but never achieving the spectacular results of his first project. Why?

As I returned to healthcare, this question continued to bug me and from time to time I was able to begin to see a similar pattern in the hospitals and medical services I was working in. How come some people are able to capitalize on early success and build careers by doing the same thing over and over again even when they do not achieve the same results?

My initial thoughts were that the ability of people to sustain a career based on a ‘one-hit wonder’ was based on a certain personality trait and while I now believe that in some respects the personality of the person, and perhaps more especially their ability to sell themselves or Emotional Intelligence, is a contributing factor to their sustained employability. It soon became apparent that there was more to this phenomenon than I had realized.