PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Simon Dodds TI - Systems engineering in healthcare – a personal UK perspective AID - 10.7861/futurehosp.5-3-160 DP - 2018 Oct 01 TA - Future Healthcare Journal PG - 160--163 VI - 5 IP - 3 4099 - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/5/3/160.short 4100 - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/5/3/160.full SO - Future Healthc J2018 Oct 01; 5 AB - Increasing demand and growing complexity of the delivery of healthcare is associated with worsening performance in safety, delivery, quality and affordability. Systems engineering (SE) is an established body of knowledge that is widely used outside healthcare in domains such as aerospace and communications. Healthcare represents a complex adaptive system (CAS) and a combination of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ systems engineering techniques have been successfully combined and piloted in primary, community and secondary care improvement projects as part of an emergent programme for developing embedded NHS capability in healthcare systems engineering. The current barrier to wider adoption appears to be a gap in awareness, belief and capability but the mounting evidence from a growing number of healthcare systems engineering (HCSE) practitioners is that this capability chasm can be crossed.