Skip to content Skip to main menu Skip to utility menu

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 2 March

March 2, 2018

The weather, and its impact on colleagues, patients, and our IT, dominates the end of this week and the weekend ahead.  Thank you to everyone working so hard to manage a difficult situation.  Today’s business continuity issue with technology is linked directly to the weather.  Liam Kennedy and Caroline Rennalls are leading work this weekend to try and help, and we will all need to do our best to support each other, either directly through sharing 4x4s, or in cross covering where colleagues cannot get into work.  There are lots of examples of fantastic team support across the Trust this week, and of course if you can think of anything that would help please speak up.

On Wednesday, the Prime Minister made a very welcome statement to the House of Commons about Midland Met.  The Trust’s twitter feed has the clip!  She described what Tony Waite, Alan Kenny and I can see at first hand, which is everyone working very hard to try and get work restarted on site.  We are beginning at the same time to finalise an assessment of the clinical and other risks that arise for us if we are not able to complete the new hospital in 2019/20, which you will recall is twelve months later than we had always intended, and said was necessary.  The promise from the government of work restarting as soon as possible, also reiterates the certainty that the build work will happen and that we will in time move out of our current poor estate, and more vitally get to a clinical configuration which supports high quality seven day services.  Of course if it does transpire that there is considerable delay around the work’s completion, then we will need to explore any interim moves of services between our sites.  Right now that is not our plan, but during March it will become clear, and probably final, what our timescale will be.  We are hopeful to having an interim construction contractor mobilised in coming weeks and that will be a welcome sign of progress.

Yesterday’s Board meeting also approved revised nursing establishments recommended by Elaine Newell and her team.  These have been built up over many weeks based on our acuity audit work this winter.  These revised establishments will be the basis of our rosters from the start of May.  Within that approval we were able to invest further in ward supervisory time, tackle some hotspots around quality, and support a substantive peripatetic “HIT” team to manage roster gaps and focused care.  Our relative financial stability allows us to make those choices, similarly to last year’s investment in an NIV unit or in a higher dependency surgical bed model.  Of course that stability rests on continued efforts to bear down on our costs.  Having halved agency spend this last year, we need to do so again in the months ahead.  At the same time during March, we will implement changes for staff undertaking bank or agency shifts, which require a competency check at the start of work (bank/agency) and a performance assessment at the end (agency).  Both will be a condition of payment, but the intention is nothing to do with money and everything to do with safety.  We need to know the skills and confidence of the people working with us on our teams.  These checks necessitate conversations which allow that to happen, and for someone coming on shift to ask for and get the support they need.  That is true in any professional discipline, and we are especially keen to ensure that trainees and others working with us, especially those unfamiliar with our systems, are inducted before they start work.

It is now almost a full year since we were inspected by the Care Quality Commission.  Much has moved on since, and my sense is that we continue to improve our safety culture.  The implementation of further improvements around the identification of sepsis both in ED and in our wards remains a focus of work in coming weeks, as well as ensuring that our deprivation of liberty (DOLs) work is meeting expectations.  Take a look at the new bright orange screensaver loaded up now on Sepsis, setting out some big and helpful changes in our approach effective immediately.  Our latest round of In House Inspections take place in the week of March 12th to test our standards, on things like resus trolley equipping or medicines security, as well as to understand and hear feedback from staff and from patients. The launch of Purple Point this last week gives us another route through which to hear feedback, and it will be really important that we are all emphasising to patients and carers the ways in which they can get their compliments and concerns acted upon.

Finally I wanted to draw your attention to some upcoming matters to look out for in coming days:

  • Hot Topics takes place again on Monday and Tuesday next week. From April the timing of the cascade will change as we align our messaging to the Clinical Leadership Executive each month – but the senior cascade will also become a mandatory attendance event, with a changed format focused on learning from excellence.
  • You should have seen publicity around the temporary closure of the Hallam Restaurant to allow its upgrade. This is a great time to try the new ordering app and also to rely on our other outlets.  See details in staff comms.
  • Digital champion and early adopter training for Unity is going on right now. Do grab your opportunity to learn as we move towards deploying the new system this summer.  I know I started this message with a reference to IT downtime, but we will have a more resilient network by April, and moving to Unity helps us further with much more cloud based storage.  So let’s get ready for the warm weather and for change!

#hellomynameis….Toby