Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 8 June
June 8, 2018
The focus on quality and safety of care was absolute at yesterday’s Board meeting. And the future integrated care model for our Trust was considered at yesterday’s Health and Wellbeing Board as well. In each case collaboration and shared learning are what will move us forward. That is what has led almost every part of medicine, and all of our community wards, to meet our shift by shift safety standards last week. Congratulations to Claire, Michelle, Chetan, Arvind, Kemal and the team. In our A&E departments we have also met, especially at Sandwell, the adult safety standards, whilst sustaining the standards in children’s EDs which I have praised here before. This is a fantastic achievement, in the face of a huge rise in emergency admissions (up over 8 percent) and major rota gaps too. This application and dedication across acute care teams now needs to meet our sepsis challenge, which, together with sorting out palliative care coding, is what will reduce first avoidable deaths and then relative mortality rates in our organisation.
Today we held the first special board meeting ever that was wholly devoted to acute care quality, and it was clear there that absent gains in sepsis identification and emergency care waiting times, we still fall short of our own definition of Good when we meet the CQC this autumn.
To sustain excellence we know we need the right workforce in place. We have made acute medical hires in recent days, and had training medical roles returned to use by Health Education England in A&E. If you follow Trust senior nurses on Twitter you can find myriad examples of great practice in Lyndon 5 or D15. We need decent IT, of which more later, and the right service configuration.
Next week we will formally confirm that the extant PFI for Midland Met arrangements will be ceased, and as we move towards finding a delivery partner for 2022, the Board has resolved to focus time too on a reconfiguration of some acute services in 2019 in order to help sustain care quality and aim for better seven day services on a multi professional basis.
Safety depends on resilience and reliability and I know we are all frustrated by unreliable WiFi and major access issues with technology. From the start of July my Friday message will be accompanied by statistics showing the prior week’s IT system performance, which you can compare to your own experience, as we strive to improve. A commercial IT partner will join us in the weeks ahead as we aim to build the skills and capability to do what is needed but what is hard. The recent travails of TSB and Visa illustrate that the NHS is not alone in digital struggle, nonetheless, we all want to get into work knowing our jobs can be done helped by technology, not dodging round it. Recent outreach IT walkabouts to proactively identify technology issues have helped I hope, and the single biggest theme from those trips was printing issues. The Board will receive details in four weeks’ time of what it will take to fix those printing issues, and have them stay fixed when we switch over to Unity later this year. We expect that to be in late October – a delay of a year which reflects your feedback and our lived experience of poor IT. By the time we go live we must be ready, and so must our infrastructure.
Massive congratulations to a whole series of Trust teams who have made the finals of national awards ceremonies. Our respiratory team were at the HSJ Value awards last night; they were nominated in the acute service redesign category for the Future Hospitals’ Project. Also last night, Raffaela Goodby was shortlisted for HR director of the year by the Healthcare People Management Association – they also shortlisted our work on recruitment in nursing. Meanwhile the Healthcare Finance Management Association, West Midlands branch did give us the innovation award for e-rostering, a recognition of the work the bank office team has done to improve our temporary staffing processes and therefore reduce agency spend.
Thinking of awards, the deadline is near for our own annual award nomination process. Our Star Awards categories have been in daily comms for weeks and the deadline for your many nominations is the end of June. So if you are bored of Brexit, or the group stages of the upcoming World Cup do not grab your attention, find a few moments and nominate that person or team whose work you have always admired.
And the board also green lighted our car park building programme… the search for a solvent construction firm starts soon. Having doubled car parking capacity at Rowley Regis last year, by the end of next year I would very much hope to see multi- storey car parks at both our acute hospital sites.