Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 3 May

May 3, 2019

More colleagues joined our Trust on Wednesday. Two new GP centres became part of our organisation. Colleagues in IT, human resources, and finance have worked hard to get us this far, as well as Chris Archer, Dave Baker, Alec Gandy and Dottie Tipton – thank you all! Most importantly, the practices give us all an opportunity to learn from primary care colleagues, and to experiment with them on new ways of working together. In June our new practice at Summerfield Health Centre near City opens too.

Yesterday our amazing iCares directorate presented to the Trust Board meeting at Rowley Regis. Their work is focused on wrapping services around patients, and working to deliver outcomes important to that patient. The challenge that links these two programmes of work is this: Of emergency patients attending or admitted to our hospital services, what proportion of those patients are known to our services already, and to what extent could we act to prevent emergency deterioration. This challenge is an old one, not a new one. But as an organisation committed to care coordination and integration, and with Unity coming to join up data across primary and secondary care, we need to be working through how we use our data and our intelligence to support people at home when we can.

On 13 May iCares will be part of a new service being offered by the Trust. All patients discharged from our hospital care in Sandwell will have contact with a health worker from our team in the first 48 hours after they are discharged. The contact may just be a courtesy call to check how things are. It may follow up an ordered blood test and make sure that is happening. It may initiate a home visit or other care. The service is not instead of referrals to district nursing. But it is failsafe, harking back to our work in 2016 on the LACE tool, to try and help with readmissions, and to make our care offer just a little bit more coordinated – as we promised it would be in our 2020 Vision.

My TeamTalk video is now out, and I am filmed in front of the Headquarters’ Unity 28-Day Challenge poster. We have got our Unity Corner up and running, and are gearing up for the Play System. Paula Gardner has led the way by visiting Favourites Fairs. Is your team taking up the challenge? Unity will be with us this summer, so it is important we all begin to prepare, and the more we can do that as teams locally, the smoother implementation, and go-live will be. Favourites are vital – Unity is a complex product and however intuitive we make it, the shortcuts you want for your work will be different to someone in the next door specialty.

I wanted to thank everyone who was interviewed or talked during Wednesday’s latest Speak up Day. Data tells us that many people do feel safe raising concerns or putting forward ideas. But there is clearly still some concern that either nothing will happen, or someone will be victimised for talking “out of turn”. Of course, sometimes a concern will be raised and there is nothing that needs to be done, or an idea will come up that does not go forward. But typically that will be rare. As our weConnect Pioneer teams will provide over the next six months, we want to make it easier to get things done around here. And there is no financial impediment to many of the things that might get suggested. Clearly, speaking up is about a culture where we positively encourage the raising of issues or concerns. That is why I am so encouraged that we were able to confirm at the Board yesterday that no more than a dozen incidents reported are outstanding an investigation 21 days on. This is our standard now and I pay tribute to the very many managers, clinical and non-clinical, working hard to stay on top of that position. Richard Samuda and I are clear that every incident needs review, and that we ought to be able to point as a Trust, and as individual employees, to concrete examples of things changed here by incidents, risk reports, complaints, compliments, audits and guidance. I know Trust-wide we are, but locally you may not be able. As you consider your final pitch for QIHD accreditation that is something to consider – what culture do you have where you work and what could you do to move forward improvements for your colleagues or for our patients?

Whilst GPs are working more closely with the Trust, they are also busy responding to national instructions to work more closely together in clustered groups, as Primary Care Networks. Unlike CCGs, or PCTs, or PCGs, or…you catch my drift, PCNs are about service provision not about commissioning things from others. So once the networks are finalised later in May we will be working alongside each to think about how best to coordinate our efforts. In Sandwell we are hoping to develop a shared leadership platform with the voluntary sector, local authority, mental health partners, the children’s Trust, and ourselves, along primary care, in what is tentatively labelled the Sandwell Care Alliance. The goal is to improve outcomes over the long term, and the approach will be collaborative, but definitively about focusing more attention on traditionally excluded groups and those suffering the health effects of inequality. The Alliance, and we would expect to create a parallel one across Ladywood and Perry Barr, will be our local version of what national policy and jargon calls an Integrated Care Place. The energy we generated at the Hawthorns on Monday last was encouraging, and I hope we can convert that into something powerful and important as we finalise the systems for care that will, among other things, support our Midland Metropolitan Hospital from 2022. We have probably all been part of similar ventures that had promise but came up short and it will be down to all of us locally to make sure that we meet the ambitions that our local residents would have for us to join up our efforts and coordinate care with them.

Read the latest edition of our stakeholder newsletter: SWB By Your Side May 19

Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 3 May 2019

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