The Back Story Cards

Two years ago I was facilitating a Flowopoly workshop at a conference at Stirling University, and towards the end of the session one participant made a suggestion for how to improve the "resonance" of the replays. He said that we should try and incorporate individual patient stories into the workshop, so that people could get a better idea of the impact of poor patient flow on actual human beings.

I've experimented with a few different ways of doing this over the last couple of years, but the way it happens now is that for each patient who's occupying a bed at the start of the day, if you look underneath their "current" card you'll be able to see all the previous ward stays that patient has made in their hospital journey so far. This way you realise that the vast majority of patients occupying beds in general hospitals came in originally as emergencies through A&E (so there's a yellow card), and in many cases, they spent a long time in A&E before they got admitted, and you realise that a lot of them have also passed through a lot of other wards (green cards for Assessment wards, blue cards for the other wards) before they reached their current ward.

It's a nice feature, but it's a lot of work to build it in. A hospital with 400 beds will typically need about 800 back story cards in addition to the cards we already use. And getting them all in the right order without any duplication is a complete bloody SQL nightmare. But when you finally get it right and they all start rolling off the Canon printer production line, it does - thankfully - start to feel as if it's worth the faff.