Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 12 November
November 12, 2021
This week has been a tough one. If its been tough for me, it will have been tough for all of you, I am sure. I am sure the general public are getting fatigue and suffering from information overload about the pressures on our NHS, but nobody understands the nature of those pressures and the reality of them better than all of you and, with winter pressures starting to bite, the situation is getting worse. The news around the NHS has been dominated this week by senior leader’s concerns and fears about urgent care pressures being leaked from internal staff meetings to the press. It has also been dominated by the physical manifestation of a system under strain – deteriorating ambulance handover waits at hospitals and the consequent inability of the crews of those ambulances to respond to category 1 and 2 calls in a timely manner. Health outcomes for those needing ambulance support when in respiratory distress or having suffered a fall, are deteriorating as a result too.
One of my “extra curricular” roles is to Chair the Black Country Urgent Care Board and as such, I am asked to oversee the production of a systematic and thorough approach to the mitigation of patient safety risks in urgent care through a system winter plan. I have this week, also been working with Trust Chief Operating Officers, including our very own Liam Kennedy, to produce some more radical proposals about how hospitals might be able to better handover patients from ambulance crews and get those crews back on the road.
Our system and Trust winter plan focuses exclusively on how we mitigate patient safety risks within emergency departments, acute medicine, within community teams, within social care and within GP surgeries. The times when one part of the system can point to another and say “they’re under less pressure than us” are long gone. Whilst I am relatively assured that initiatives like frailty intervention, community rapid response increase in capacity, contingency beds re-opening etc will help us to mitigate the worst of the pressure which is expected in mid-January, nevertheless we will still be working at levels of bed occupancy and spill-over demand which will test us hugely when keeping patients safe this winter.
We will manage this period if we stick together, holding our Trust Promises at the forefront of our minds when interacting with each other and with patients and carers. Blame or incivility will not help us or your patients. There will also be times when as a leadership team, we may need you to step out of the normal boundaries and procedures that we have had long established. This may make you uncomfortable, but you can be assured that we won’t request those changes of you without having done a comprehensive assessment of risk and our request will always be made in the interests of those patients who we are not caring for adequately, in their hour of need, in their most acute phase of illness.
Finally, I was pleased to join a simple and highly effective remembrance service this week at Sandwell General. It reminded me that no matter how anxious or angry we may be at the moment about the pressures we are under, we still have freedom of speech, freedom of movement and a parliamentary democracy in our country. Our forefathers fought for it. We must cherish it and cherish each other during difficult times.