Systems engineering in healthcare – a personal UK perspective

Abstract

Increasing demand and growing complexity of the delivery of healthcare is associated with worsening performance in safety, delivery, quality and affordability. Systems engineering (SE) is an established body of knowledge that is widely used outside healthcare in domains such as aerospace and communications. Healthcare represents a complex adaptive system (CAS) and a combination of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ systems engineering techniques have been successfully combined and piloted in primary, community and secondary care improvement projects as part of an emergent programme for developing embedded NHS capability in healthcare systems engineering. The current barrier to wider adoption appears to be a gap in awareness, belief and capability but the mounting evidence from a growing number of healthcare systems engineering (HCSE) practitioners is that this capability chasm can be crossed.