Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 10 May
May 10, 2019
Wednesday 15 May marks the Chairman’s Iftar when we celebrate the welcoming of Ramadan. Join in the celebrations at Arches Café, City Hospital from 8.30pm-9.30pm with the fasting being broken at 8.45pm. There will be a wide range of food and drink available and also the opportunity to ask questions and gain support for the coming weeks of Ramadan. Thank you to everyone undertaking their observance of Ramadan and those supporting them.
This Sunday we celebrate International Nurses’ Day across the Trust. This week there have been a number of activities to mark this moment, including a contest to learn about innovations being taken forward by particular wards. Paula Gardner, our chief nurse, led the judging process, and Newton 3 won first prize for their work creating space and a facility to support patients without adequate clothing – for example those who are homeless. Congratulations to Sherry Craig, and everyone who completed an entry. It feels as if we are building already to November’s weLearn poster contest. QIHD in May is again asking for confirmation of accreditation bid status, as we look to make sure that every ward and every team is undertaking structured quality improvement time. The learning topic this month is ‘near misses’, on the back of our Speak up Day. We want teams to think through how near misses are acknowledged, discussed, celebrated and learnt from where you work. We have near misses in IT, as we all know, in theatres, but in truth every department will have moments where something could have gone awry. If we are to develop the quality improvement culture that we are after as an organisation, it needs to be ok to red flag things that nearly went wrong. Part of the feedback being sought from QIHD discussions is how best we do that, Trust-wide. This focus on near misses is another facet of the coming weLearn programme that I have mentioned here regularly in 2019. The Board is determined to help to support organisational learning – both great practice like our nurses’ day contestants, and from complaints, incidents and risks.
Of course every day right now we are all trying to learn about Unity. We are into our third week next week of the 28-Day Challenge. I know there is a huge amount of activity across our sites, and little by little we are getting closer to our go-live. In June and July our super users will be trained, alongside our digital champions. The digital committee is reviewing the exact go-live plan by which we move from our current systems to the new ones. Favourites Fairs have continued this week. They are the route by which you can get yourself set up on Unity and save the system to appear to you as a user; how it will be when you switch it on; on our first day. All of us, when using IT, have short cuts, and things that let us move faster, and if we can have that uploaded then when we do go live it will prove easier to switch. This week we have had a couple of fairly major IT related disruptions, both with our shared drives for documents, and with our landline telephones. Even though the stats show that things are improving, I do appreciate that confidence remains fragile.
One of the biggest mobilisation activities this month is our huge recruitment drive. As a Trust we are determined to address the 700 vacant roles we have funded in our system. In advance, I want to thank those working hard to have adverts out, panels set up and offers made. A lot of work is also going into what is called the “on-boarding” process whereby things like uniforms and IT access and such are ready when or before someone begins work here. The data is clear that turnover and retention are issues for us in the first year of someone’s employment. So we know that we have work to do to make it easy to start work here, fun to join the team, and straightforward to make your mark and achieve your goals. Our appraisal system is part of that, and so whilst the push is on to complete all end of year PDRs by the end of June, every new starter must have that form of clarificatory conversation after a few weeks with us. I know for example that recruitment in our Birmingham and Midland Eye Centre is going apace, and walking round the site with Bushra Mushtaq and her leadership team it is very clear the work we need to do to have our eye hospital ready for a larger workforce, treating many more patients in the next two years. BMEC is a valued and integral part of the Trust and we want to make sure that the team have what they need to succeed.
Next week we undertake the first of a new round of review meetings with each clinical group management team. These eight weekly sessions will ensure that there is no gap between senior clinical leaders in frontline services and the Board. The discussion focus this time includes: Making sure that no patient has missed safety plan checks, securing the growth in research and development studies that Kathryn Gill and the R&D team have begun to plan, delivering our quality plan including ending missed sepsis screening (1 in 10 still omitted sadly), being ready for our smokefree go live on 5 July, and of course meeting our plans for funding, workforce and waiting times. These are the sorts of big changes that were within our 2020 vision when we created that together in 2015, and as we count down to next year, we want to secure as many of those benefits as we can. Targets like increasing the diversity of our senior leadership, reducing avoidable bed use for people with alcohol abuse issues, and improving stroke outcomes are being delivered, but there is much left behind the 2020 vision that we still need to complete.
As we look to move beyond 2020 we will of course build our future plans alongside primary care and with other partners. Tuesday next sees the latest coming together of primary care leaders with Trust colleagues, this time with GPs from across Ladywood and Perry Barr. I know there is great energy behind individual projects in respiratory medicine, diabetes, paediatrics and iCares, as well as emerging ideas in acute medicine and orthopaedics. I am hopeful that as Unity connects up data from across our system, it will give us the information to build on strong relationships and intentions and deliver better results for our patients – every NHS plan, and every chief executive, doubtless claims that is the aim. Our challenge, through the learning models, and through doing as well, is to actually go beyond talking and into doing. I was delighted this week to get a surfeit of feedback from GPs that that is precisely how the Trust is increasingly being viewed beyond our walls. So there are signs of progress, and much still to do. Our funding model for the year ahead is very clear. Traditional payment for ‘review’ outpatient contacts is suspended, and we have scope to innovate, providing care remotely and virtually if that is best for our patients, and frees up time for other work, including the improvement work that sits behind our quality plan. Evidence again that we do have some joined up thinking here – and need to seize our chance.
Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 10 May 2019
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