I was at the top of my health anxiety game (a.k.a. totally bossing it) when I was single, happy and carefree (carefree but for the question \u00a0\u2018why doesn\u2019t anyone love me? Sniff!\u2019) \u00a0The lack of love actually helps here however because you can kind of compartmentalise the fragility of your existence with \u2018meh, so what if I die, who\u2019d miss me?!\u2019 (cut to Mum and Dad screaming from afar \u2018we would!\u2019)<\/p>\n
Fyi, this attitude also helps with conquering a fear of flying!\u00a0 Bonus.<\/p>\n
Having a child and her being the absolute best thing ever<\/em><\/strong> kind of changes all of this though and now I need to not die again and neither must she.<\/p>\n With each illness and the need to visit a Doctor, the tension starts from my fingertips into the pit of my stomach and burrows deep into the core of my being. She\u2019s been having trouble with her ears recently and this has required trips to an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist in our local hospital.<\/p>\n Hospital visits with beloved children are next level anxiety triggering.<\/p>\n As I was sat waiting for our recent appointment however, I caught myself not feeling as anxious as I would usually feel in such times. \u00a0Sitting there felt very different to my normal \u2018sitting and waiting for a health professional\u2019 experiences.<\/p>\n Why was this experience so different? Well, I can only really attribute it to the presence of a massive window.<\/p>\n The huge window let the light stream into the atrium of the children\u2019s hospital and made the whole space and vibe feel radically different. Everywhere was bright and airy, full of optimism and hope! Oppressive trepidation didn\u2019t seem to hang in the air at all?<\/p>\n I found myself suddenly grateful that the window hadn\u2019t been \u2018value engineered\u2019 out of the building plans, such was the extent to which the light literally lightened my mood.<\/p>\n How much cheaper would it have been to just have a wall there and yet how much the building would have lost – its whole energy would be completely different.<\/p>\n So yes, I took a picture of it and thought to myself \u2013 \u2018hmm, this might make a nice blog\u2019.<\/p>\n Value Engineering – The Institute of Mechanical Engineers describes the value engineering process as \u201ca systematic and creative method used to increase the value of a product or service. It is a technique used to reduce the cost of a product or service while retaining quality, reliability and safety\u201d.<\/p>\n Sounds sensible.<\/p>\n Wikipedia offers a definition which is a bit more stark and synonymous with how I have come to understand its use \u2013 \u2018value engineering is a systematic analysis of the functions of various components and materials to lower the cost of goods, products and services with a tolerable loss of performance or functionality\u2019.<\/p>\n \u2018Tolerable loss\u2019 is never going to \u2018spark joy\u2019 within anyone or anything.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure that there are lots of value engineers out there bemoaning my interpretation of their craft in exactly the same way as I roll my eyes at people who don\u2019t understand lean (\u2018lean is not primarily about removing waste ACTUALLY\u2019). Maybe the building had<\/em> <\/strong>been value engineered and the window made it through the process, such was its importance within a space designed for the most heart wrenching aspect of all life, sick kids. I honestly don\u2019t know, I just know how much of a difference that huge window made to me that morning.<\/p>\n I suppose that this blog is simply an extension of the theme of a variety of my musings, that of the \u2018difficult to financially quantify\u2019 thing that is value.\u00a0 That window would have been expensive, and potentially therefore, expendable, but how much the service would miss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I started working for the Lean Enterprise Research Centre in 2005, I was part of Ann Esain\u2019s Health and Services team. Ann was leading an action research project across […]","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":1203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[68,12,3,8],"tags":[88,61,87],"custom_author":[44],"class_list":["post-1202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","category-operations","category-organisational-culture","category-value","tag-architecture","tag-value","tag-value-engineering","custom_author-sarah-lethbridge"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2025\/07\/Noahs-Ark-window.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1204,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions\/1204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=1202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2025\/07\/Noahs-Ark-window.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n