Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 16 February 2018
February 16, 2018
Many colleagues in our organisation are today celebrating the Chinese or Lunar New Year that begins today (16 February). Our catering team served up a special menu to mark the occasion.
Over the coming two or three weeks there are some important decisions that will be made across our organisation. I wanted to consider a small number in this week’s message. Thank you to all colleagues who are engaging with Digital Champion training in preparation for Unity, our new electronic patient record. We know that during 2018 we will take this important step to improve our technology and the safety of care that we provide. In coming weeks we need to complete work installing additional computers across much of our organisation and finalising changes in our standard operating procedures (SOPs) to ensure that the way we work matches with the new technology.
Only after a further period of walking through the new system with clinical colleagues will we make a go live decision about the timing of change. That timing must also reflect improvements in our IT infrastructure resilience which will be in place by the end of March.
Of course, discussions about our new hospital and how to manage the demise of Carillion continue. We are working to secure work restarting on the site at the same time as seeking to agree a funding package and model to complete Midland Metropolitan. Support for the new hospital remains extremely strong and so we should continue to make our preparations for organising services to a single acute site. With that in mind our work to improve the integration of care with local primary care partners is picking up pace. And I am delighted to confirm that from April patients in a number of key specialties will have their follow up care organised through local GPs. Just as we now have the ability to book patients GP appointments, that service will have access to our computer system as if we were working as one with primary care colleagues. That is, of course, what our patients would expect from a single NHS.
Next week we gather for a safety summit in maternity services. I look forward to hearing clinical colleagues present their action plan to address governance weaknesses identified in our multi-professional processes in obstetrics. We should be in very many ways extremely proud of the service that we are able to offer but the summit will help us to think about how we can improve further as we look to tackle perinatal mortality.
I’m delighted that the Board’s Quality and Safety Committee, when it reviewed the outcome of the safety summit in Trauma & Orthopaedics held late last year, was able to see significant improvements in care being achieved by our teams.
We are moving towards agreeing budgets and financial arrangements for the organisation for the next two years. That means a difficult set of choices as we seek to balance investment and change. We are releasing a significant number of vacancies for recruitment at the same time as expecting substantial reductions in our agency expenditure. We will review the outcome of the nursing establishment review led by Elaine Newell, Chief Nurse, and Paul Hooton, Deputy Chief Nurse, and invest where we can to tackle acuity and move our ward-based teams to a seven day model of seniority.
What is perhaps different about our finances in the year ahead is that unless we are able to meet our income and expenditure expectations each month we will not be able to fund our capital investments in buildings an IT projects. The Board will consider how we balance the risks created if we need to cancel established investment priorities. Of course the answer to that is to achieve our improvement goals and I know that each of our clinical groups and corporate directorates are working extra hard to do that. Form 1 April we will have a new financial reporting system that makes the data on that work much more accessible to clinicians and front line managers.
Finally, this week saw our latest Quality Improvement Half Day and consideration within that of a shared learning topic around the healthcare needs of the LGBT community. In the next few weeks we will approve and communicate our Trans policies for patients and colleagues which will bring clarity to the approach we will take in our care for members of the Trans community across Sandwell and West Birmingham.
I think we should be proud as a Trust of the work our staff networks in particular are doing. And in coming weeks a new staff network for Eastern European employees will start work.
#hellomynameis….Toby