Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 31 December
December 31, 2021
In my final message of 2021, I would firstly like to start by thanking you all, once again, for your commitment, professionalism and dogged hard work during the past year. In the face of both a second wave of COVID pressures last winter and a third wave this winter, we continue to strive hard to deliver good care to our patients and this is done through no little discretionary effort from clinical and support teams, coping with unprecedented levels of staff absence.
Looking to 2022, I would love to be able to paint a rosy picture of the sunlit uplands of opportunity and hope, as is so often pedalled by our governing politicians nationally. But I can’t, at least, not just yet. Whilst we will be formally signing off our new Trust Strategy for the next five years in January, with its exciting focus on maximising the opportunity borne by the Midland Met developments, our leadership in population health improvement and investing in both the recruitment of and development of our staff, the first two or three months of the new calendar year are going to be very tough indeed. This may take a shine off the launch of that new strategy, but it won’t deviate us from that long term focus. Improving things for our people, our patients and our population is a long term responsibility and we won’t shirk from that responsibility.
With regard to the rest of this winter period, I would like to share a few thoughts with you. Urgent care demand will be peaking between 3rd January and 16th January 2022. This will coincide with unprecedented levels of staff absence due to the Omicron variant and, because we have yet to see the impact of Omicron from the Christmas and New Year social mixing locally, the peak of emergency admission demand in the unvaccinated population, could be even higher. Although it may not feel like it to you all, our bed demand has been tracking along the predicted numbers in the “best case” scenario thus far. We can be thankful for small mercies, I guess.
Against this backdrop, you will have also seen in the local and national media and on social media, the plans regarding hospital “super surge” capacity and the introduction of the new “Nightingale” units at key locations throughout the NHS. We have responded to these requests, yet have made it clear that whilst we have additional physical space we can open, on Sheldon Block at City Hospital for example, it does not mean that we feel we can staff that capacity. As a leadership team, my executive colleagues and I share your concerns that our staffing ratios have already been diluted too much so, if there was to be a need to create more capacity for emergency admissions, we would seek to pull down more of our elective work first, and would not consider a heroic and unsafe attempt to continue to try to do everything, in the face of staffing absence rates which could exceed 13%.
I hope this message is clear. I thank you for your continued efforts. It has been humbling to witness it this year. We have a bright and exciting future to aim for, delivered through our new strategy in 2022 and beyond, but the next few months are going to be exceptionally challenging. We will always seek to get the balance right between servicing the presenting needs of our most acute patients and protecting you, our staff.
I hope you do get some time off over the coming weekend. See you in 2022.