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Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 29 April

April 29, 2022

Thank you to all of you who are continuing to work hard on supporting patients, supporting each other and keeping people safe while many services are under significant pressure. COVID-19 is very much still with us and, although, thankfully, we are seeing far fewer patients become seriously ill with COVID-19, the impact on how we stream patients to COVID / non-COVID areas continues to have a big impact. Our “Living with COVID-19” arrangements continue to progress and we keep a regular executive team (at least weekly) check on our arrangements, risk assessing to see what we can change based on risk assessments that take into account the community cases, inpatient numbers, staff sickness absence and outbreaks.

Contrary to belief or rumour in some quarters our IPC guidance at SWB remains unchanged at present which means:

  • Mask wearing – is essential in all shared areas (clinical and non-clinical) within our sites and the clinics we provide services from. Please follow this essential rule and respectfully challenge those that don’t.  This also applies to meetings even on a 1:1 basis
  • Asymptomatic testing – continue to test twice weekly using LFT kits that can be ordered free of charge for any NHS employee
  • Follow the Trust guidance on return to work following a COVID-19 positive test result and when you are a household contact

I know some other NHS organisations are implementing different rules.  That is a matter for them.  Our view is clear that the current rates of community infection and the ongoing risk of nosocomial transmission locally, means we can’t change our approach just yet.

Our visiting arrangements remain somewhat restricted although I am pleased that we have been able to relax this for critical care so that those people who are most acutely unwell can have more contact with their loved ones. On occasions, a minority of visitors have been challenging to deal with when asked to comply with our visiting arrangements. I want to emphasise that none of us should have to accept verbal or physical aggression or violence at work. Please ensure you escalate any incidents. We will take action.  Where necessary, we will arrange for visitors who are abusive to be removed from our sites and suspend their ability to visit. What is helping to minimise these incidents is when relatives and loved ones are given clear information about the visiting arrangements when they book a visit so that they are not surprised on the day as to the length of time of the visit or that in most cases only one visitor is allowed at a time.

Due to last minute staff absence and the fluidity of our bed base you will appreciate that at times we need to balance the safety of our patients so colleagues are sometimes asked to move and work in a different area for all or part of their shift. I fully understand that this is not an ideal situation and I would like to thank the vast majority of you who cooperate willingly albeit reluctantly, to support our areas who are struggling. Only a minority are pushing back on this so I would urge you to reconsider your approach if asked to move. It is only done to ensure we can keep patients safe, which must be our priority at all times.  We do not ask you to move to another clinical area just to annoy or upset you.

For myself and fellow technophobes, this weekend is important.  This weekend a significant change is taking place when Microsoft end support for Office 2010. From Sunday 1 May colleagues using the Outlook 2010 desktop application to access emails will find that it no longer sends or receives any further emails. Please make sure that you use the online email portal at www.office.com by logging in with your NHS email address and password using Microsoft Edge. It is important that you take note of this so that you are not caught out this weekend. Further information on the migration to Office 365 has been shared in our usual communications channels including bespoke messages, that includes special licensing requests, what to do with email archived files and how to get support with Office 365. Make the most of the support on offer here so that your work is not disrupted.

Whether you are working or have a short break, please do have a good bank holiday weekend

Richard