What cutting hospital waits taught me about sharing what we know

How long would you wait to see a doctor before giving up? For a lot of people, the wait is the difference between getting care and going without.

I recently gave a webinar on a project management approach for cutting those waits. What struck me most wasn’t the method itself; it was how the same lessons show up in clinics all over the world, and how much depends on sharing what we learn. The talk was for Project Management Olympus, built around the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG 3): good health and well-being for everyone. The Association for Project Management’s Knowledge Interest Network (KIN) then asked me to write up what it says about how we share knowledge across the global project management community.

I come at this as both a practitioner and a researcher. I’ve led projects and used these hands-on tools in healthcare, and I also dig into the research that tests whether they actually work. Reducing waiting times was the example. The bigger lesson is about how knowledge travels: between doing and studying, and from one country to the next.

The same problem, almost everywhere

Long waits look remarkably similar whether you’re in a clinic in Texas, Tanzania, Taiwan, Ireland, the UK, or any number of countries. And the research points the same way.

Studies of Lean, a method borrowed from manufacturing that strips out wasted steps, show shorter waits and more patients seen, often with no extra staff or money. The fixes are surprisingly ordinary: smarter scheduling, clearer paperwork and smoother handoffs between people.

But here’s the catch; the improvements range from tiny, to more than 90%. That range is the real story. The method that slashes waits in one clinic and barely moves them in another isn’t broken. It just depends heavily on where and how you use it. Any project manager will recognise that the tool travels, but the result depends on the ground you’re standing on.

So the useful thing to share isn’t “this method works.” It’s “here’s where it worked, here’s what was different and here’s why.”

Finding the delays no one sees

Most of the waiting in a patient’s day is invisible until you map it out.

One tool I use on every project is a simple swimlane flow diagram that lays out each step and every handoff between people. In one US hospital study, most of the delay wasn’t in the medical care at all. It was hidden in the gaps between systems, where information got stuck. You can’t fix what you can’t see, and mapping is how you make it visible.

There’s a lesson here for our own profession, too. The most valuable things a project manager knows are often the unwritten ones: the handoff that always slips, the sign-off that always drags. Writing a blog, giving a talk, or sharing notes through a group like the KIN does the same job as that flow diagram. It takes what’s in one person’s head and makes it useful to someone on the other side of the world.

Getting results is the easy part

If there’s one thing I’d want people to take away, it’s this: be honest about the limits, not just the wins.

Lean can cut waiting times. Keeping them down is the harder job. The research shows the same reasons things slide back: people lose engagement, leaders move on and the early energy fades. What makes improvements stick is fairly consistent, too: involve the frontline staff and patients, give someone clear ownership, get leadership behind it and check in regularly rather than treating it as a one-off.

If I’d only shared the eye-catching numbers, that would have been a disservice. Sharing the barriers as well is what lets someone in a very different setting judge whether the approach will hold up for them. Sharing only what worked isn’t generous. It can quietly mislead.

Why the global goal matters

Framing the talk around SDG 3 turned a local efficiency win into part of something bigger.

A shorter wait isn’t just a nicer experience. It means the same clinic, with the same resources, can see more people, which is a real step toward equitable health care for everyone. The UN’s goals give project managers a shared language for connecting one project to a global aim. And that shared language is a knowledge-sharing tool in itself. It lets a clinic (project) team in one country and a team on the other side of the world see that they're part of the same effort.

Three things I’m taking with me

A method is a starting point, not a guarantee. What’s worth passing on is the detail of where and why it worked.

Be as ready to share what didn’t work as what did, especially with a mixed audience of doers and researchers.

The things that make project work visible are the same things that move knowledge around: a process map, a global goal, a good network. They all help what one person knows reach the next. Keep augmenting and paying it forward.

Knowledge only creates value when it travels with enough context for someone else to use it wisely. Whether you are a project professional, a researcher, or simply someone looking for better ways to improve how work gets done, the challenge is the same: share not only what worked, but what did not, why and under what conditions. That is how individual project lessons become collective capability, and how local improvements can contribute to global outcomes.

My thanks to the APM KIN team for inviting me to write this, and to Project Management Olympus for hosting the original discussion. This question of how ideas travel is a personal one for me right now: I’m beginning a full-time PhD in Project Management at the University of Limerick in Ireland. I hope to keep contributing to that exchange, and if you’re working or researching anywhere project management makes a real difference, I’d love to keep the conversation going.