Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 30 July

July 30, 2021

Thank you for your continued efforts to step up and face this latest wave of COVID-19. This increase in inpatients with COVID-19 is meaning that we are having to rapidly enact our surge plans to ensure that we can safely stream patients to red, amber or green areas. For many of you this is our fourth wave and feels like stepping once more into the eye of the storm. Let us not forget, however, that we are as well-prepared as we have ever been – COVID-19 treatments are better known and practised and more people are getting vaccinated which should give us comfort. However, unvaccinated people still make up the vast majority of those admitted to hospital and to ITU who are critically unwell. Younger people are becoming seriously ill, sometimes fatally so.

Our message remains that vaccination must be a key way to help break the cycle of transmission, along with regular testing, social distancing, handwashing and use of PPE. Thank you for keeping going with all this.

We have spent the last week reviewing once more the pay rates for bank shifts so that we rightly do all we can to maintain patient safety and encourage take up of additional shifts in high risk areas. This meant we have temporarily increased bank rates for registered nurses in certain areas. We are also able to confirm that the wave 1 enhancements that the Trust put in place in April 2020 to respond to the first wave of the pandemic will remain in place until there is a consistent approach to bank rates across NHS organisations in the Black Country. We have checked our bank rates against our neighbouring Trusts and are assured that they are higher than others locally. We want to firstly fill our shifts, where there is sickness or a vacancy, with our own, valued staff rather than rely on agency workers. You are all far more familiar with our systems and processes, and our standards of care.

I also know that, at times, some of our areas are not able to fill all the shifts we need to, so that some shifting around needs to take place day by day.  The Board are well aware of the fact that we are at times needing to change our nurse to patient ratios at the moment and do not consider this a long term sustainable position, however it is, on the balance of risk, safer to do this than to leave acutely unwell people in overcrowded emergency portals.  I am sorry if this affects and frustrates you but it is vital that we maintain patient safety with the numbers of staff on duty across the Trust. Thank you for being flexible and accommodating these changes. I know that this is tough and it is relentless.

I have heard this week about the verbal abuse that some of you have faced from people when you are asking their vaccine status or explaining that they have COVID-19. I am sincerely sorry for what you are experiencing – it is not acceptable. People are entitled to their different opinions about lockdown restrictions and vaccinations but when you are being faced with hostility and being called liars because of your professional diagnoses and taking of medical history this crosses a line. I would urge you to ensure that you report all cases of verbal abuse, declare them on our incident system and call our fantastic security team if you feeling in any way unsafe. We will do all we can to make a stand to protect our colleagues.  In certain cases we will consider prosecution, if we feel it appropriate.