Preface
Key points
* Much of tie development of care pathways In the UK is fragmented with patchy take-up and use of the concept • Great duplication of effort In care pathway development Is occurring across the UK, . The full potential of care pathways as a quality Improvement technique is not being realised, neither in paper nor electronic form,
Why we wrote this book The current approach to care pathway development in the United Kingdom (UK) can be summarised as 'reinventing wheels on an industrial scale'. A search on the current care pathway database on the National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) demonstrates the extent to which there has been duplication of pathway development effort at local healthcare provider level. For example, fractured neck of femur care pathways are listed by over 60 different National Health Service (NHS) organisations. Yet at the same time the number of organisations that have large numbers of care pathways in use is relatively small in the UK. Scrivener (2000)1 points out that the NeLH database shows that the range of pathways per organisation is between one and 141 and the mode, i.e.