Gamgee Lecture

The man at the heart of improving health care in hospitals by adopting efficiency methods from private sector companies, will be delivering the annual Gamgee Lecture at the Birmingham Medical Institute (BMI).

Matthew Cooke, Professor of Emergency Medicine at Warwick Medical School and the Heart of England Foundation Trust will be giving the lecture on November 20 at 7.30 pm (6.30 pm for supper) in honour of Joseph Sampson Gamgee who founded BHSF Group, the sponsors, and BMI. 

He leads the Clinical Systems Improvement group which teaches and researches systems that improve the quality and safety of care by learning from other sectors and includes lean thinking, Six Sigma, systems reliability and human factors.

The basis of much of the work relies on simple principles - cut out any component that does not add value for the patient, wherever possible design-out sources of error and develop systems where the best route is also the easiest route for staff to follow.

His work started by using techniques from manufacturing and service industries to reduce waiting times in hospital emergency departments.

In his role as Department of Health Emergency Medicine Adviser, he used his research and the work of colleagues at Warwick University to apply systems similar to those used by Tesco in reducing queues and Toyota in increasing to new ways of caring for people in emergency departments.

He is now studying how similar external techniques could be applied to improve patients’ safety. 

Peter Maskell, chief executive of BHSF, said: “Professor Cooke’s work on using private sector methods of efficiency to improve standards in NHS establishments is renowned.

“The lecture will have a special pertinence for all those who have the interests of medical care at heart”.