Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 7 February
February 7, 2020
Yesterday’s Trust Board in the Hayward Room at City Hospital heard from Saurav Bhardwaj, specialty lead for A&E, alongside Helen Mallard and Amandeep Tung, as we explored how best to help emergency care to meet the rising challenges of an ageing population. I know that furore over coronavirus adds a further challenge to managing ambulance and walk in arrivals. And towards the end of this year, subject to consultation with local residents, we expect to take over responsibility for the Parsonage Street Walk-In Centre. It’s busy, so it is good news that recruitment is now going really well. Our first graduate of the Trust’s in-house CESR programme has become a substantive consultant, and we are starting to feel better staffed much of the time.
Heartbeat hit the streets last week with a headline about general practice that marks a real milestone for the Trust. When we think about major health challenges like screening uptake, late pregnancy presentation, managing long term conditions, or better investing in mental health, we want to be working hand in hand with primary care. Many patients will continue to be looked after by GPs in the traditional manner, but for one in ten local people, they have now got the option of registering with a GP who is part of the Trust. That practice can still refer anywhere else, of course, but I would hope over time we can shape our services better to fit the needs of residents served by the Your Health Partnership primary care network.
That theme of joining up services applies too to care homes. Aided by experts like Professor Dan Lasserson, one of our acute physicians, and a professor at the University of Birmingham, we are looking to take our historic involvement with local care homes one step further. Around half of all local care home residents typically have a hospital admission each year. In 2020/21 we plan to invest in a major research programme that looks to in essence prevent all such transfers. Part of that work is about advanced care planning towards the end of life, but it is also about how we connect medics and other disciplines into care homes and make different decisions about where we provide care. When we think about next winter this work has the potential to change colleague and patient experience, and as the work evolves we will keep you posted. NHS winters do not have to be the way they are!
Our Board visiting programme focused mostly this week on neonates and paediatrics. It was fantastic to see the new NNU facilities we opened just before Christmas, and we look forward to the dedicated emergency care for children unit that will open in early spring at City. Our patient story yesterday highlighted some of the challenges families face in our busy emergency departments and I know that we are working to get it right each and every time. Children and young people’s services are one of the areas where we want to show the Care Quality Commission later this year the Good work being done by teams. I walked away from our visits encouraged by the enthusiasm and team work on display. Recruitment in neonates for example should allow us to hit the BAPM standards in 2020-21 and the enthusiasm of professionals from all disciplines for that standard was really clear. New facilities can bring new pride and a new chance to do things that we have always striven to do.
As the picture at the top of the page shows, the Board visits also gave me chance to present our latest Star of the Week award, to Tracy Weston on D21. A few different nominations have come in for Tracy and one in particular focused on her work to make the very best use of Care Planning within Unity. Talking to Tracy’s colleagues, including the kind lady who reminded me to wash my hands (great job!), it was clear how much work has put in to building the knowledge of the whole team in this area. Unity implementation, or optimisation, has always been rightly viewed as a middle distance race not a sprint, and I know we have work to do in the next few weeks to make sure, especially for medication administration and reconciliation, that we are sharing best practice between teams and getting it right.
Next week is not just Valentine’s Day but also another milestone week for our new hospital, and sees more publicity and work on our AI programme. With national funding bids due in, and the Trust very much at the forefront of work on using artificial intelligence, there is real scope for us to move at pace to get great digital technology into our organisation. I know we still have issues, and our PACs upgrade and storage changes in BMEC are pending, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that we will end 2019-20 in an incomparably better place with our IT than we began the year. This week I received an NHS-wide edict telling me to urgently move our external connections to an HSCN format, only to be able to write back and point out that we did just that ten months ago. IT investment will continue and Heartbeat this month profiles on pages 12-13 some of the leaders who are driving forward our IT department. If you are reading this and do not know who serves on the digital committee for your clinical group then do pipe up and ask your group director of operations (Tina, Beth, Jonathan, Mel or Mandy…). Digital ambition is not the preserve of the interested, or the Board, or a few people, but is something that is absolutely mainstream for us all – so do please get your information governance training done if you are not yet compliant!
Finally, this week we confirmed that Liam Kennedy will take over as Chief Operating Officer in March when Rachel Barlow starts her new role as our director of system transformation. That post takes on the estate brief, is responsible for the equipping, commissioning and completion of Midland Met and in particular for making sure that our clinical model for acute care changes ready for 2022. Over the next couple of months there are other changes within the Board team and I would expect by April to be able to include within Heartbeat the Trust structure and senior leadership arrangements through to 2023.
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