Last summer the Harvard Association of Ireland, a group of Harvard University graduates in the Republic, volunteered to address the problem of unacceptable hospital waiting lists.
They gathered 50 senior managers from across a range of business and technology disciplines unrelated to the health service.
These high-flyers were asked to look at the acute hospital service in the Republic, using the same principles of "best practice" they would apply in planning, logistics and process management in their own companies.
The group's starting point was the Harvard/Stakeholder approach, looking at the perspectives of each of the "stakeholders" in the waiting-list process: the GP, hospital manager, consultant, nursing staff, admissions officer, Department of Health and Children and, "most importantly", patient.
By reconciling and accommodating the different perspectives of each of the stakeholders, it is possible to come up with a "holistic" perspective. The result of the case study is the report, as yet unpublished, called Waiting Lists: Analysis, Evaluation and Recommendations, by Prof Ray Kinsella, director of the Centre for Insurance Studies in the UCD Graduate School of Business.