Healthcare Operations Management for Service Delivery Training Course

Course overview

Healthcare operations leaders must improve access, flow, quality, and cost while working within clinical governance, staffing constraints, regulatory requirements, and variable demand. Delays in emergency departments, missed theatre capacity, discharge bottlenecks, clinic backlogs, and uneven workload distribution are rarely isolated problems; they are connected failures across pathways, handoffs, information, and resource planning. This course equips participants to diagnose those operational issues using evidence rather than anecdote and to design changes that protect patient safety and service standards.

Participants learn to map patient journeys, measure demand and capacity, identify bottlenecks, analyse waiting-time variation, and apply Lean and Six Sigma methods in hospital, outpatient, diagnostic, and community-care settings. They work with process maps, value-stream maps, capacity models, queue data, run charts, control charts, Pareto analysis, and root-cause tools. The course also addresses workforce deployment, bed management, theatre utilisation, discharge planning, escalation processes, performance dashboards, and the governance needed to sustain operational improvement.

Instruction combines expert-led healthcare operations sessions with applied data exercises, service-delivery case studies, and team workshops. Participants use realistic operational datasets to investigate a constrained care pathway and test improvement options before selecting a practical intervention. Each participant leaves with a healthcare service improvement charter containing a defined problem statement, baseline measures, stakeholder map, proposed workflow changes, implementation milestones, and measures for tracking results. A certificate is awarded on successful completion.

The programme is designed for experienced healthcare professionals, operational managers, and improvement practitioners who influence service performance and need a structured method for turning operational data into safer, more reliable care delivery.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Map end-to-end patient pathways using swimlane process maps and value-stream mapping
• Calculate demand, capacity, utilisation, takt time, and backlog measures for healthcare services
• Identify operational bottlenecks using queue analysis, Pareto charts, and constraint mapping
• Analyse waiting-time and throughput variation using run charts, control charts, and stratified data
• Apply Lean waste analysis and root-cause methods to patient-flow and service-delay problems
• Design capacity and workforce deployment scenarios for beds, clinics, theatres, and diagnostic services
• Build a healthcare operations dashboard with balanced access, quality, flow, and productivity measures
• Produce a service improvement charter with implementation milestones, risks, owners, and benefit measures

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Healthcare Operations Managers — who are accountable for patient flow, service performance, and resource utilisation
• Hospital Department Managers — who must improve throughput, staffing deployment, and daily operational control
• Clinical Service Managers — who need to translate pathway problems into measurable improvement actions
• Quality Improvement Leads — who support Lean, Six Sigma, and evidence-based change across care services
• Bed Management and Patient Flow Coordinators — who coordinate admissions, transfers, discharges, and escalation
• Healthcare Project Managers — who deliver operational change programmes involving clinical and non-clinical stakeholders

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have at least two years of experience in a healthcare, social care, hospital, clinic, diagnostic, or public-health service environment. They should understand their organisation’s basic patient pathway, routine performance measures, and the distinction between clinical outcomes and operational measures such as waiting time, occupancy, utilisation, and throughput. Confidence using spreadsheets for sorting, filtering, and simple calculations is expected, as exercises use Microsoft Excel. Prior Lean Six Sigma certification, statistical programming, Power BI expertise, finance qualifications, or formal project-management credentials are not required.

Training methodology

The five-day programme uses instructor-led teaching to establish healthcare operations concepts, followed by hands-on application with realistic service datasets. Participants map a patient pathway, calculate capacity and utilisation, investigate variation in waiting-time data, and use Lean tools to diagnose delays. Small-group case work focuses on emergency, outpatient, theatre, diagnostic, and discharge scenarios, requiring participants to defend operational choices against safety, quality, and workforce constraints. On the final day, each participant develops an application plan and receives structured feedback on their service improvement charter.

Course outline

Day 1: Healthcare operations and patient flow foundations

• Healthcare operating models across acute, outpatient, diagnostic, and community services
• Patient pathway segmentation and service-line boundary definition
• Swimlane process mapping for clinical and administrative handoffs
• Value-stream mapping of patient, information, and material flows
• Operational performance measures for access, flow, quality, cost, and experience
• Demand patterns, arrival variability, and service-level implications
• Problem statements, operational baselines, and improvement charter structure

Workshop: Participants map an end-to-end patient journey for a delayed outpatient referral pathway and produce a baseline problem statement with initial measures.

Day 2: Demand, capacity, and resource planning

• Demand forecasting using historical volumes, seasonality, and referral patterns
• Capacity calculation for appointments, beds, theatres, diagnostic slots, and staffing hours
• Utilisation, occupancy, productive capacity, and the risks of operating at full load
• Queueing principles for arrivals, service times, waiting lists, and backlogs
• Bottleneck identification using constraint mapping and throughput measures
• Workforce deployment scenarios using skill mix, rosters, and demand profiles
• Capacity escalation triggers and daily operational control routines

Workshop: Participants build a capacity model in Microsoft Excel for a diagnostic service and produce two staffing and appointment-slot scenarios.

Day 3: Lean improvement and variation control

• Lean waste categories applied to healthcare pathways and support processes
• Standard work design for referrals, triage, handovers, and discharge preparation
• Root-cause analysis using five whys, fishbone diagrams, and cause-and-effect matrices
• Pareto analysis of delay reasons, cancellations, defects, and rework
• Run charts and control charts for distinguishing common-cause and special-cause variation
• Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles and the IHI Model for Improvement
• Failure mode and effects analysis for operational changes affecting patient safety

Workshop: Teams analyse delayed-discharge data, create a Pareto chart and fishbone diagram, and define a testable PDSA intervention.

Day 4: Operational control, dashboards, and implementation

• Daily management systems, huddles, visual controls, and escalation pathways
• Balanced dashboard measures for safety, quality, access, flow, workforce, and finance
• KPI definitions, data-quality checks, targets, and denominator discipline
• Microsoft Power BI dashboard design principles for healthcare operations reporting
• Theatre utilisation, cancellation analysis, and session productivity measures
• Bed management, discharge prediction, and transfer-of-care coordination
• Stakeholder mapping and change adoption across clinical, operational, and executive groups

Workshop: Participants design a one-page operations dashboard and escalation routine for an emergency-to-inpatient flow case.

Day 5: Service improvement business case and action plan

• Selecting improvement opportunities using impact, effort, risk, and feasibility criteria
• Improvement charter refinement with scope, aims, measures, and governance
• Benefits realisation planning for capacity release, waiting-time reduction, and quality gains
• Implementation roadmaps, milestones, dependencies, and accountable owners
• Risk registers for operational, clinical, workforce, data, and regulatory risks
• Communicating operational evidence to clinical leaders and senior decision-makers
• Sustainability controls, audit cycles, and post-implementation review methods

Workshop: Each participant presents a completed healthcare service improvement charter and 90-day implementation plan for peer and instructor review.

Tools & standards covered

Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, Minitab, IHI Model for Improvement

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions