Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 31 May
May 31, 2019
A big week next week in the life of our Trust! The Trust Board will be asked on Thursday to approve a recommendation to appoint Balfour Beatty as our preferred contractor to finish Midland Met. And on Tuesday over 200 clinicians and senior colleagues will contribute to our annual leadership conference. Meanwhile, as I tried to explain last week, over 400 job offers are out with candidates to join our Trust and another 600 jobs are recruiting. We are promised new national guidance by Wednesday on the Pensions issue that the BMA have raised concerns about NHS-wide. Then on Friday the national lead for learning disabilities visits our Trust to learn about the work we are doing and to compare us to best practice around the UK. Mondays sees our latest in-house Green awards, building on the prizes we won nationally a few weeks ago.
With each passing week the need for the Midland Metropolitan Hospital becomes more obvious. We are hugely expanding the surgical work of our Trust and so we need theatre space. Heartbeat last month was all about imaging, and the new build lets us separate planned from unplanned scans. And whilst bay nursing can be easier than single rooms and offer some companionship for patients, many prefer the dignity of a single room, especially with the en suites we will have by 2022. Discussions continue to finalise not just our interim neonatal investment, but the changes of City paediatrics, Sandwell respiratory medicine, and our frailty model; all of which we want to get in place in 19-20. We are trying to use the delay to ‘MMH’ to make sense of the clinical model with which we will operate the nine floors we will have in the future, alongside the BTC, our refurbished Sandwell, an expanded BMEC, as well as Leasowes and Rowley Regis.
The yearly Leadership Conferences we hold are always working days. This time we will discuss what our digital future holds after Unity goes in. Having an electronic record is just the start, and this week Sarah Yusuf, Bahadar Bhatia and myself were putting the finishing touches to a collaboration with Watson IBM around Artificial Intelligence in imaging analysis. We would be the second place in the UK to do this. We will joined by leaders from Walsall, from Dudley, key GPs and colleagues from the mental health Trust to discuss care integration. Digitally integrating care has been much in the news this week with proposals elsewhere which we will watch with interest. But to be unequivocal, better outcomes locally will come with ever more focus on the most vulnerable people in our communities, and the right care model will be grounded in list-based general practice. Tomorrow we open our third GP practice, this time in Summerfield next to City – the Heath Street practice will work with Urban Health and is our latest collaboration as we work through how best to support families and individuals with self-care and home care.
The biggest topic in the leadership conference will be our welearn programme. Almost every team has now submitted for QIHD accreditation (good luck to all, especially urology). The race will open later this month for our 2019 QIHD poster competition. But later in the year we will implement our own Learning From Excellence project, and before that all of us will get our own Policy Portfolio, pointing us very directly at new guidance or official documents that our jobs need us to be aware of. Whilst we will open cyber cafes on our sites in the autumn, as far as we can we will make all of these endeavour mobile friendly, with over 1800 colleagues now using myconnect on their own, or a work, mobile.
Recruitment of course is only the start in creating the workforce model that we need to help our patients in the future. Flexible working is part of our retention plan, as is our training investment. Whilst we can all think of individuals who have or will retire, with our thanks for their service, our major retention issue remains people who join and leave us inside two years. We have work to do to make sure that the friendliness and decency that we are known for as a Trust extends to new recruits, and that those people feel able to seek and get support and development. Our Emergency Departments have led the way with a coloured dot on the badge to let people know how long someone has been on the staff – and maybe to prompt extra care and support for people just joining us. Bethan Downing is leading work to make sure that joining the Trust is simpler and smoother, and yes that includes having uniforms ordered before you start and ready to fit from day one. It also includes your digital identity with access to key systems in place – as you would expect in a Trust where implementing Unity this year dwarfs all other projects but offers such massive benefits to safety and quality.
Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 31 May 2019
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