About the course

One of the most fundamental requirements of high-quality patient care is that it is timely and efficient.  Unnecessary waits and sometimes harmful delays must be avoided, as must the wasting of valuable resources such as equipment, consumables and the time and energy of caregivers themselves.  However, healthcare services face ongoing difficulties in providing sufficient capacity to deliver the right care, in the right place, at the right time.  And as the global Covid-19 pandemic has vividly illustrated, the consequences of getting capacity decisions wrong are almost always serious and sometimes fatal.

This highly relevant course enables clinicians and managers to overcome capacity and productivity challenges using practical tools that can be put to work immediately to analyse the current operational performance of a healthcare facility or service; measure the gap between actual and desired performance and then make radical improvements.  The course considers all four ‘levers’ of healthcare operations excellence – purchasing and supply, process technology, capacity and improvement – but places a particular emphasis on aligning capacity and demand in order to enhance patient flow – ie, the ability to treat patients quickly and efficiently, with minimal waits or delays, as they move through the stages of their care.

Delivered via IHLM’s online learning platform and through live interactive Zoom webinars you will become part of a global community learning how to transform patient flow together.

What you’ll learn

On completion of this course you’ll be able to:

• understand why healthcare operations management has four major decision areas: capacity, purchasing and supply, process technology and improvement

• use evidence-based tools and models to make important purchasing and supply decisions

• evaluate new technologies and decide whether your healthcare service should use them

• forecast patient demand and analyse your health service’s capacity

• design a healthcare operations dashboard to measure or observe your service’s current performance and identify performance targets

• assess the current state of patient flow and use process mapping to expose problems of capacity and variability

• understand how well capacity is aligned with demand and know when it is time for change

• manage and eliminate variability by smoothing, homogenising and separating patient flows

How you’ll learn

This course is broken down into eight weekly modules:

• work at your own speed through a carefully curated collection of self-paced online learning materials that include video lectures, podcasts, interviews and real-world case studies

• evidence-based research from peer-reviewed publications will help you dig more deeply into topics that really interest you

• you are not alone – you will interact with other course members, collaborate on learning activities and get direct feedback and coaching from the course leader during weekly Zoom webinars

• earn professional certification by completing weekly learning activities and mini-projects

This course should take approximately 4 – 6 hours per week.  You can expect to devote about 1 – 2 hours per week to self-paced learning, 1 – 2 hours per week preparing for and participating in the webinar and 1 – 2 hours per week applying your knowledge through learning activities and mini-projects.  Every webinar is recorded so you can rewatch it at any time.

Who should take this course?

This course will benefit anyone, whether they have a clinical or an administrative background, who manages or leads the day-to-day operations of a healthcare service or who plays a role in delivering operational excellence or optimising patient flow.

About the certificates

Upon successful completion of the course you’ll receive an:

• IHLM Certificate of CPD Completion – This may be useful for course members who belong to professional bodies that have Continuing Professional Development requirements.  The course has an estimated 60 hours of guided learning.

• IHLM Professional Certificate in Healthcare Operations and Patient Flow Management – This is evidence of the skills and capabilities you’ve developed during the course.  The award of a professional certificate requires completion of learning activities and mini-projects during each module.

How to register

Ready to start?  Just click the ‘Register now’ button at the top of this page or use the ‘Ask us a question’ button if you’d like to talk to one of our course facilitators.  The fee for this course is £995 per person.  If you’d like to pay in instalments you can arrange this by contacting us at: registration@ihlm.org.

We provide discounts to organisations registering 3 or more staff in the course and can also provide a customised in-house version tailored to your organisation’s specific needs.

All registrations are subject to our terms and conditions which are available here. By registering for an IHLM course you are accepting these terms and conditions and agreeing to be bound by them.