Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 7 June
June 7, 2019
Yesterday the Board met and, in what may have been the last meeting in the Anne Gibson Boardroom before that building closes in the coming winter, we agreed to appoint Balfour Beatty as the contractor to finish Midland Met. The decision needs confirmation over the coming six weeks through Whitehall. On Tuesday our Leadership Conference heard from Paul Faulkner, Chief Executive of the Greater Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, about the future of the city as we move towards HS2, the Commonwealth Games (with its regeneration of Perry Barr) and about the central role he foresaw for the Midland Met in the story of the city’s renaissance over the next decade. It was an inspiring idea and one we want to make a reality, but a reality that tackles poverty and exclusion from Rolfe Street to Dudley Road. That is why we are working with partners on a masterplan for investment, transport and regeneration across that landscape.
Common to the Board meeting and to the Leadership Conference was a continued focus on the welearn programme. There is a never event to investigate in general surgery. But the programme launched on Tuesday also has learning from excellence at its heart, and a much greater emphasis for our clinical audit and effectiveness function. Over coming months we want to make sure that we are sharing what works best in our organisation and system. That is why it is so important that we get face to face communication in place at a local level, and why new communication ideas like the surgical services group WebEx, and the Medicine Matters newsletter from Julie Thompson, Chetan Varma and Beth Hughes, matter very much. At the top of this page is a graphic illustrating the sheer scale of learning that could come from the issues you already highlight in our Trust – with a particular shout out to everyone reporting near misses, our QIHD shared topic from May.
We now have the agreements we need to confirm that go-live for Unity will happen from 23 September. I attach a one page brief on the implications of that decision, including for annual and study leave. We have much to do still to be ready – and our super users are getting trained now for their vital support role. From Monday the current upgrade to Unity to ensure that everything is in place ready for go-live will be complete. Planned maintenance on the Play System is also complete so please use it to safely practise different scenarios and workflows. Over 500 more computers and devices arrive in early August. Meanwhile our new Pulse VPN is imminent and we are even trialling a possible route to single sign on, to replace multiple log-ins. We all “get” that Unity is not a technology project, it’s a safety and a quality project, but we know too that tech helps and we are working to get the best. That is why yesterday we green-lighted an artificial intelligence partnership in imaging – fresh from their starring role in Heartbeat a month ago, the team delivered 87 per cent of reports in less than four weeks from referral in May: By far our best figures ever. Many congratulations.
After the Trust Board, the whole leadership team, including our group directors, walked the current smoking shelters and informal cigarette hangouts of the City site. Phil Foley, who is leading the implementation of estate change, and Santokh Sagoo from the security team were our guides. We spoke with patients and visitors who were smoking. And with members of our gardening and estates team who spend many hours sweeping up the debris from smoking each day. When we go live, in addition to our wardens, security team, and enforcement team, we will also have senior leaders out and about on shift challenging any non-compliance. With security cameras, and more being installed, we should be able to photograph those breaching our new arrangements. We will not be escorting either patients or staff off site, day or night, to smoke: Instead our focus in on nicotine replacement at the bedside and on vaping alternatives for those outside. I still hear tales of ‘reputational damage’ from street smoking at our gates. I hope you do not choose to do that but to be clear the damage on which we are focused is the health impact for you and others. Our breaks guidance is attached. Please take a look at it. It replaces any informal understandings that exist today – and it is clear there is no such thing as a ‘fag break’.
Next month most of our Board meeting will be devoted to children and young people. One in six of the patient contacts we have as a Trust are with people under 18. We care for some of the youngest communities in the country. And you know that our community children’s services are rated as Outstanding by the CQC. With that has come the reintegration of Sandwell’s school nursing into our Trust. We want to look at how services are shaping up, not just for the youngest children we look after, whose long term health outcomes can be profoundly influenced by their early years, but also at our transitional arrangements for teenagers and young people moving from designated paediatric services into adult ones. Paula Gardner, our chief nurse, chairs the Children and Young People’s Board, which looks at these issues across all our services, and the role of the CYP Champion, inaugurally filled by Chizo Agwu over the last two years, will be advertised soon, given Chizu’s promotion to be one of our deputy medical directors, with a focus on our vital quality plan. I am really excited by the emphasis that the Board has chosen to place on younger people over the next couple of years – after all we have said for a while that the measure of success with Midland Met is whether it inspires local school children to think of science and care as their future and their career.
Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 7 June 2019
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