Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 1 November
November 1, 2019
Yesterday was going to be EU Exit Day and Midland Met contract signature, and tomorrow is the rugby world cup final, even without Wales. There’s not much to say on the third point beyond thanking Hallam staff for having the game on TV for anyone coming off shift. Brexit arrangements have been deferred until January 31st, and thanks too to those in teams like supplies and estates who had worked hard on the required food and fuel contingency plans. You will appreciate that next week public services enter an election purdah period. But certainly suitable to encourage anyone not yet registered to vote on December 12th to do so and a simple link is provided below to help you:
https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote
Arrangements to complete Midland Met in 2022 are moving ahead. Following government approval of the business case which reconfirms the funding and gives us permission to sign a contract, we continue to negotiate detail of the design, risk transfer and costing with Balfour Beatty. I was delighted to hear that Balfour will be sourcing all of their local recruitment work through our Learning Works team, as well as adopting the Trust’s #smokefree model. I am hopeful we will see work kick off this side of Christmas. Next week at the Trust’s Board we will probably confirm contract award for the Facilities Management provision of estate services to support the new hospital, which you may remember is to be both our main distribution centre for all sites. Our new hospital has robot enabled movement of goods and services through discreet and separate corridors.
If you have chance to read Heartbeat you will have seen details about our work on Car Sharing. This is not an option for everyone but it will work for some people and some times. Across the West Midlands Combined Authority we are working to cut journey volume by about 30% to the level of car use seen in major European cities. If this might work for you, you can download the Faxi app at https://get.faxi.co.uk/swbh-nhs. Meanwhile we met with planning officers this week on both our new car parks, as well as work we are trying to stimulate about regeneration work up the Dudley Road. Far from this having nothing much to do with health, you will know that air pollution is a major health issue and one that we can play a part in addressing. The Clean Air Zone in central Birmingham is now expected to start in July 2020, and you can find details on the council’s website about where it is sited and which vehicles it affects.
Hopefully last week’s TeamTalk has now been shared with you, and if not there is a short film from me, here on Connect, that summarises the key themes. One topic in there is our grounds and gardens review, and the work we are doing to promote physical fitness and mental wellbeing. The gym at City, refurbished and open 24/7, goes free to use from today, alongside the one in Trinity House at Sandwell. And on Saturday mornings at Sandwell we are supporting on site Slimming World sessions for visitors, patients or staff colleagues.
As we think about winter in the NHS, and our new ward arrangements from later this month, I know vacancies, recruitment and retention are front of many minds. Rightly so, as being fully staffed is absolutely the crux of our strategy for the organisation, and lies at the heart of any quality improvement work we want to do: A settled team, able to learn together. That is why we support key worker programmes like our Live Work project, which this week was profiled at the first Sandwell Care Leavers’ Forum awards for young people about to exit the care system into adult life. But it is also why we have focused, at your suggestion on Speak Up day 2018, on flexible working opportunities. It is very clear from exit questionnaires and other feedback that we are still not always, consistently, getting there on this, or on Reasonable Adjustments, which are a related issue. Tomorrow we have a specific recruitment fair in Medicine and Emergency Care targeting applicants who want flexible working arrangements and you can expect continued emphasis, ideas and fuss about this topic in the coming weeks. There are lots of NHS organisations around us, and we want to distinguish ourselves in various ways – one of those ways being recognising that no one succeeds at work if there is not balance with home.
Attached to this week’s message is the note I promised last week on changes to how we recruit and the role of managers. We are determined to make it quicker, easier, and smarter to get hired here and join us sooner rather than later. Anyone offered a job should feel welcome and wanted. Earlier in the week I hosted a small lunch for a group of new starters in the Trust who has been with us less than six months. That is something I will do every few weeks. The reason that I am doing that is that I want to see for myself the gap between what we promise and what new starters sometimes experience. That is why next week’s Board has a paper reviewing our arrangements for Local Induction in the Trust. What struck me in listening to Hayley’s lunch group was how passionate and committed people are, and how the passion of this Trust and our commitment to social values is a key part of why people stay and why people join. I was also struck though by the work that we need to do as leaders to make sure that corporate backbone functions truly help those giving care to our communities, and also the steps I need to take to make sure that our intentions, messages, vision and strategy gets through and makes sense whether one is working in orthotics or orthopaedics, paediatrics or primary care. The way to do that will be to better support middle managers in organisations, both clinical and non-clinical, to be able themselves to translate whole Trust ideas into local relevance.
It is with great sadness that I have to inform you that our colleague, Donna Coates died suddenly on Monday evening. Donna started working with us in October 2016 after joining from the Birmingham Community Trust. She led the admission avoidance ACP team, community matrons and case managers and leaves behind a tremendous legacy. As a passionate clinician, improving patient experience was always her main focus. However, she also greatly influenced her colleagues through her dedication to training and mentorship and under her leadership we now have a team with greater clinical skills and experience, including a fully qualified team of ACPs. Donna developed the admission avoidance service to provide support in our AMUs and worked closely with WMAS to ensure that patients were cared for in the most appropriate place. Donna had collaborated with staff across our local health and social care system, working closely in particular with GPs and colleagues from acute medicine.
#hellomynameisToby