Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 19 July
July 19, 2019
The physicians vs. surgeons cricket game on Monday did not match the excitement of the England and Wales’ team victory on Sunday, nor the netball, but it was nonetheless a great social event. Many congratulations to the winning captain Farooq Wandroo and his team (which in bit part included me), and commiserations to the surgical team. The annual Trust game against local GPs is yet to be scheduled for early September, but team slots will be available.
Meanwhile a similar competitive spirit is now needed to get us ready for Unity. I wanted to outline in plain terms what is now needed but also thank the very many staff in all teams making huge efforts to have us ready. Today’s Digital Committee, with representatives from each clinical group, and the clinical workstream leads too, reflected on progress, but also acknowledged the work to be done in August to be ready for September 21st when cutover begins. This coming Friday our Board’s digital committee will review progress against our agreed Go Live Criteria and that programme of review continues to the Board’s meeting at the start of September.
It is good news that the Pulse remote access solution is not only proving more reliable than what it replaced, but also means that key interfaces like home reporting for radiology are now possible. You can also access the play domain remotely now. The replacement N3 lines are in, and we will have HSCN in place in full before unity go live. Over the next fortnight almost £1m worth of devices arrive and are deployed, and that kicks off intensive connection and printer testing in August. At the same time our WiFi programme is virtually complete and in mid-August we will publish heat maps of coverage to demonstrate that fully. In the first week, this week, of our fortnight of additional dress rehearsal no WiFI issues have inhibited practice. Meanwhile we have solved the Windows 7 Citrix issue, and tap on/tap off will resolve the time it takes to get into the Unity product. Put more simply, the technical issues we have faced do not look likely to defer go live. From August 10th we will have a 7-day First Line IT service backing up your work, and with Go Live comes a large back office team from Cerner who will assist us during and beyond the start of the Unity product.
The big push now is to make sure that everyone knows how to use the system optimally. And that we can prove that to ourselves and others. That proof, or self-assessment, is composed of several parts:
- At the start of August we will re-launch the CapMan product which is the main way in which patients moving around our sites will be acknowledged on the system. Over 1000 roles will need to complete brief e-training on that product.
- By early August we need to finish the individual competency assessments launched with the 28-day challenge in April. About half of those who need to finish that have done so, so far. Are you missing this?
- Our team and Trust readiness criteria are well advanced, and reflect external advice. We are aiming to have met 80% of those by early August, and are confident presently of achieving about 70%. Group leadership teams are verifying workflows this weekend to make sure that we have in place all of the right Standard Operating Procedures and Quick Reference Guides.
- That leaves the individual team competencies, and the simulation exercises that sit behind them. These were launched on July 9th in QIHD team and the films and detail will come out on Tuesday in an all employee email. I want to emphasise that this work is critical to Go Live. Knowing and practicing are different things, and we want to ensure that key teams have run through together what the new system means.
On July 12th we released the leave bar for many teams in the Trust. The exception was Gold and Silver teams. By Monday we will have in place staffing rosters for the Go Live period. That will allow us to confirm staffing rotas for our Super Users and Digital Champions too. Finally we aim on Thursday to make decisions on additional staffing in emergency care areas to take account of the slower pace of work inevitable with Go Live. Taken together, these things will allow us to confirm staffing for late September and early October Trust wide.
There are literally dozens of events and moments dotted through August to give you chance to ask questions and speak up about Unity. Please take the opportunity to access all of those resources on Connect and the face to face expert advice we have generated. For over 18 months we have been almost ready to Go Live, and with our underlying technology now improved, we continue to believe that the Trust can achieve the date of September 23rd that I announced on June 4th. It is truly helpful for people to raise specific questions and concerns that we can address, or which might have been missed. That is why the confirmatory decision is in early September, but I must reiterate that it is the people and training position that we have to get focus upon at line manager level in coming weeks. The technology should be ready. We need to be ready too.
I almost completed a message without mentioning Smoke Free! Last week I indicated that new signage would be up this week and that rollout is well advanced. Analysis continues of ward’s take up of the various alternatives to smoking so that we can best support our patients to quit or take a break from smoking. Later this month we will launch further support and prizes associated with quitting smoking or switching to vaping; look out for details of those here and in our Communication Bulletin. Summer rain will bring new challenges to implementing the ban, but the better air and cleaner grounds we are seeing around us are I think encouraging – not just as a public health change, but as an affirmation of what we can achieve when we work together. The inference to Unity is obvious – even down to the T shirts.
My message last week had some useful replies posted on it. I am aware that right now we have a variety of outsourcing and tender activity going on. The most immediate is in patient transport where the CCG (not the Trust) have decided to put out a bid process. But we have upcoming decisions to make in estates too, and in one or two clinical services where our role is fragile. It is absolutely the case that the Trust will look to retain services and retain them in house where it is clear we can provide a great quality service, where there is a dependency to our aim to become the best integrator of care in the NHS, and where other services will not need to be cut back to pay for losses on contracts. The Board is not ideological about this – we are simply practical; What counts is what works, to borrow a phrase. So I can reassure Martin and many others that we will issue a bid for patient transport, which is a service we value. In that case what is at issue is the almost £1m loss that the service is currently run at. It will be for others to decide whether that loss is one that the local NHS will fund, or whether another NHS body running the service can reduce that loss. The NHS is moving from competition to more collaboration, and I very much hope that as we lead that charge we can move to a system in Sandwell and western Birmingham where the finite funds available are diverted ever more to those actions which improve health outcomes and public health. I look forward to meeting the Patient Transport team in coming weeks to discuss that further.
Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 19 July 2019
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