Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 8 February
February 8, 2019
On Monday our Full Dress Rehearsal (FDR) kicks in for Unity. You have been to the roadshows, maybe experienced the Pain and Gain events, definitely thought about the Play System, and probably been trained. FDR is our chance to test the product end to end. It is absolutely meant to help us spot issues and then fix them before we confirm go-live. I want to thank everyone involved in designing the run-through and putting time into it. Executive colleagues will be part of the testing process and you can see videos and other material about it in our communication bulletins.
Earlier today I signed the contract for our new N3 connections, which will go live during April. N3 has been the biggest single cause of IT instability over the last year, and we are investing not just in a new supplier but a hugely changed and larger connection. The NHS as a whole is changing these contracts and we have leapfrogged the queue to be ready in a few weeks’ time. I am aware that the weekly IT statistics I am sharing continue to show some frustrating figures. Plans to address the critical alerts and to tackle the backlog of incidents are due with me on Monday week, and the Board heard realistic optimism from Martin Sadler about those plans.
The Board did meet personally the paro-seals I wrote about last week. Ron Seal is imminent to complete the team. I don’t think we should have any awkwardness about embracing innovative ideas in our practice, and so I look forward to the seals being out and about. Equally excitingly Sarah Yusuf, our director of imaging services, pitched to the Board for support with a UK-leading set of partnerships around AI technologies to shorten diagnostic imaging test times and support quality in reporting. This may seem like Star Wars when PACs goes down or the link to neurosurgery is stalled, but it can offer us an edge, not just for our patients, but in recruiting staff, and so I am pleased we could get behind the work that John Morlese, Arvind Rajasekaran, Jonathan Walters and Sarah have been championing.
In the next week or so we have some big moments for public health in the Trust. We are fewer than five months away from Stop Day, when we switch off smoking across all our sites, and help colleagues to quit or to turn to vaping. Later in the month we confirm our approach to enforcement and to enticement. Shamelessly we want you to give up smoking. To be richer. And healthier. Please get alongside this campaign. We can change. At the same time, you know that we bid to restore school nursing to the portfolio of services we offer. The Trust provides midwifery and health visiting, one in six of our patients are with children and young people. If successful, we want to use the school nursing platform to work alongside teachers and parents to tackle mental wellbeing and obesity in our schools. Anyone with kids in schools in Sandwell will have an interest in our propositions: Watch this space!
By now you may have found those extra car parking spaces I advertised ten days ago. My thanks to Steve Clarke and his team for getting the paint out! In coming days, we go live with one of your ideas – reusable cups in our canteens and restaurants. Why not go out this weekend and buy yourself one? 20p off most hot beverages from our outlets when you do. And a little more space in the ocean as we tackle the scourge of waste and harm. Keep sending your suggestions in – from April my column in Heartbeat will have a regular plastics feature. I know lots of colleagues have great ideas about what we can do. Let me know. This is the longest of long term plans, but something we all have a part of play in doing.
I am definitely not ignoring emergency care in this message. Every week we seem to have a new push or project to help. We are seeing shifts where teams are clearly succeeding in meeting their own ambitions to improve quality of care. I want to emphasise that new projects and ideas are only ever a contribution to that effort, and that the energy and dedication of our teams remain the core of the effort. In March we see many more trainee doctors arrive in ED. New roles like flow coordinators are operating now. In most hours, on most days, the patients who arrive are about the number we would expect. Our drive must be to be ready and to try and end the risks to patients of being the slowly investigated or latterly diagnosed patient. Key to that work is moving patients definitely for admission (a minority) into our bed base. And key to that is early discharge or smart sitting out to free morning beds to patients into specialist beds in day light.
Finally, the Trust Board accepted an important paper on our welearn programme for 2019. You may know welearn either from QIHD accreditation, or from November’s poster contest. In the year ahead we will see a variety of developments to both ensure that we better find the learning from what we do, and better share and disseminate it. That is learning from error, but also from excellence, and we will adopt some of the projects seen latterly at the Children’s Hospital on that theme. In that spirit of learning, we also decided to undertake a look back enquiry into five maternal deaths in our Trust over the last eighteen months. The highest likelihood is that there is no similarity to be found in either cause or learning, but we want to look harder for similarity and ensure we have distilled the learning. No-one has told us to do that, and the investigation is not a holding position while we narrate uncomfortable news. It is what we do, I think, as a leadership community, which is to face openly the issues that arise in providing high risk care, and look to see how we can gain improvements for our patients. I very much hope colleagues within maternity services have access to all the help and support they need as we work to learn from recent fatalities. Both Paula Gardner, our chief nurse, and I have written to colleagues to that effect, and I want to repeat that offer here.
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