Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 22 June

June 22, 2018

Thank you to everyone who made time to come to last night’s annual general meeting. This is the event where we report our quality and financial accounts. As you might guess we were asked about the dreadful events in Gosport, where over 400 people had their lives ended prematurely. And about Midland Met and why it is taking so long to get the funding in place to finish the job. But the highlight of the evening was undoubtedly Bill Thomson’s presentation of our UK leading nuclear medicine service, and Sarah Yusuf’s fabulous run through of the improvement journey in imaging in the last two years, and technological capability we now have, in part through our MES contract and the benefits of being financially sustainable.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the arrival of Windrush transported British citizens in the UK. The Trust has been at the forefront of celebrations across the city of this, whilst working to ensure that we reflect honestly on the experience of staff working in the NHS from BME backgrounds. Our staff network has very much been the driving force behind that work, and they, and our Muslim Liaison group have organised a fast breaking celebration for the end of Ramadan on Tuesday.

I participated this week in my first conversation of the year planning this winter’s flu campaign. Thinking now and before that gets started I would invite you to reflect on the immunisation and vaccination status you have, not just for flu, but also for Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR). Despite our campaign work in March we are still well short of a safe and stable level of vaccinated staff in one or two key areas. I am enormously keen if we can to achieve that safe level without needing to alter policies or contracts for new starters. However, we cannot drift through the summer without seeing improvements in some acute areas in our levels of coverage. Paula Gardner, our Chief Nurse, will lead work on this, and I would ask all involved to reflect first on the patient safety implications of choices we make. In our public health and quality plans we are clear that the Trust views high uptake as our responsibility, among our workforce and in tackling low uptake in the general population.

Fiona Shorney leaves us in good hands with the appointment of Lydia Jones as Director of Therapies. Heartbeat some weeks ago showcased our next generation of clinical leaders, of whom Lydia is one, and home-grown too. Fiona’s first leaving do went with a swing, and much of what we are doing well in the Trust now sits within primary care, community and therapies. As a Group, for example, our colleagues in those areas report high levels of engagement, involvement and advocacy. Precisely what we want to achieve Trust wide, and we can learn how to do that best internally, as well as looking to other Trusts and industries for role models. Though Fiona is staying with us for a little longer, now is the time to say goodbye and thank you.

Work on our IT continues. The external infrastructure experts were on sites this week, and share their first report with me next week. In a fortnights time I will start sharing the performance scorecard for our IT here weekly as I promised that I would. This week we have had issues in our cath labs and pharmacy, as well as moving over the laptops in maternity. There remains no lack of effort, focus or finance and we will get on top of the difficulties this summer. Thank you to Mark, Dean, Louise, John, Martin and the team for their immense hard work.

I am still reflecting on the Prime Ministerial financial announcement and will write more next month, in the meantime we need to keep our focus on treating more patients, coding them well, and spending our funds wisely. We continue to ringfence training and education spend here and hope to see that grow further nationally in coming months.