Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 8 December 2017
December 14, 2017
Very few Friday messages have generated as much noise as last week’s announcement that we now have an Amazon Drop Box! It is near the old entrance to the new Education Centre, opposite the Hallam Restaurant at Sandwell. Another Drop Box should arrive at City soon, to be based near BMEC. There is a guide below to drop boxes, and I am told that it is ideal for Christmas presents.
Next week sees both our restaurants beginning their festive menus, and our chapels undertaking Carol Services at 12.30pm on Tuesday 12 December at City and Thursday 14 December at Sandwell. The Christmas decorating competition judging takes place on Friday 22 December.
An early entry for fabulous decorations might be on Priory 2. This week we opened the new enhanced care unit for patients needing additional critical care support. This is designed to bring together patients typically looked after across the surgical bed base and provide a single specialised environment for care. The unit is part of our plan to deliver improvements for laparotomy patients under our quality plan, which you will recall is a key part of our 2020 Vision. Thank you to our nursing, anaesthetic, outreach and surgical colleagues for their teamwork and enthusiastic development of this idea, which is funded by monies voted by the Board as a whole. We very deliberately reserve some funds annually to invest in quality and safety, recognising that this makes local cost improvement targets slightly larger.
Celebration too for some of those teams whose hard work on quality improvement is reflected in our first QIHD league table. All teams will be rated by April, so the positions shown will change, but we have work to do now to help teams move towards silver and gold ratings. Typically that comes from multi professional working and the delivery of some specific quality aims or improvement goals. From the judging panel so far it is palliative care who are setting the pace, with honourable mentions to Imaging and Rheumatology
In Hot Topics this month we highlighted Basic Life Support training as something we have more work to do on. Around 59% compliance now, and a target of 90% by 31 March next year. I know that there are issues with the e-learning system, as well as with the relevance of the training for many colleagues working outside hospital. Both are things that will change. Meanwhile though we need to get training rates up and I know team leaders will work to do just that. Our mandatory training syllabus is being re-examined to make sure that the content and style of training reflects our community and hospital work, and not just the latter.
We welcomed the Trust’s occupational health (OH) team to the Board yesterday. The service now extends widely across the Black Country and has taken on contracts in primary care and local universities. Lots of people have worked really hard to improve the way we manage ill health in the Trust in the last eighteen months, and OH have played a key role in that. There is more to do, especially on mental health and wellbeing, and next month we will look at radical plans to do more and help morale and mental health in our Trust. In the meantime, we thanked the OH team for their work, and of course discussed the flu campaign. There are a handful of teams whose vaccination coverage is still too low (you know who you are) and each are talking to me directly next week about what would help to improve our uptake in some key clinical areas where we are putting patients at risk.
#hellomynameis…Toby