Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 29 June

July 6, 2018

The deadline for Star Award nominations is today! Although if you want to submit over the weekend we will still take your form. Meanwhile, Joy Walker – senior sister on D26 – is down to the last ten on the short list for Nursing Leader of the Year in the Nursing Times Awards. Huge congratulations to Joy, and to her team. They have been winning prizes within our consistency of care process, and I know that our elderly care ward cluster are starting to stand out for the quality of care they are able to provide. That said, like all our hospital wards, we have work to do this summer on sepsis care – and during July we will have data available on the timeliness of our risk assessments and responsiveness. You will remember, I am sure, that improving Sepsis care is our number one quality priority this year as we look to prevent avoidable deaths and harm. The Trust has above expectation mortality rates right now, and this is the biggest step we can take to address that. More importantly, it’s just the right thing to do.

The delivery of our safety plan, and now our quality plan, and the Consistency of Care programme too, have been grounded in work listening to your ideas and views. This coming Wednesday we have the first of a series of Listening Into Action events with staff across our Emergency Departments to see what we can do better to improve staff experience and patient care. You may remember from previous Friday messages that on key safety measures our EDs have dramatically improved since February – measures like pain review and VIP chart completion. But we all also know that wait times for care are far far too long – in the bottom ten in the NHS right now. Changing this is, of course, a whole Trust project. So our iCares team will be diverting some ambulance conveyances to their service, and we are changing – from Monday -pathways between ED and orthopaedics. Your ideas on what would help deliver shorter waits are welcome.

Congratulations to our maternity team, and especially to our infant feeding team Louise Thompson, Kristy Dunning, Kirsty Hall and Carmen Nuttall for supporting the wider teams to attain our successful breastfeeding re-accreditation. In terms of public health and life chances we know we want to support mothers to breastfeed. Again, this is a whole Trust project, and if we do admit someone to one of our general wards who is still breastfeeding we must support that, using ward fridges, like someone would at home. It was a patient story at our Board that first highlighted some of the ways in which our ways of working stood in the way of breastfeeding among our patients, and it must be common sense for us all to help support the aims our maternity team are leading.

Congratulations too to our colleagues at the Royal Wolverhampton, who have been rated good by the CQC. That is precisely our aim for later this year, and if we can maintain our standing in most services and drive up standards in medicine and emergency care then we can do it! A good rating is what your hard work deserves and what our patients deserve. So if you can see weaknesses in care please raise them, Speak Up, and let’s try together to make the best of what we already do our norm. That of course applies “in” and “out of” hours. My thanks to our senior nursing team for last week’s 4am visits. I know Paula has disseminated feedback on what worked well in our wards, and some points to change. Our uniform policy applies at night…

Our latest Team Talk video is out. During the start of the cascade, where all our senior leaders meet and talk for an hour, two issues came up a lot. Concern over the new continence pads and the training that has gone with that, which senior nurses will address over coming weeks, and issues about mandatory training recording and access. Bear in mind that in the PDR moderation in our Aspiring for Excellence project you cannot be rated 3 or 4 if you mandatory training is expired. If you have issues you feel are not being addressed do highlight them to Bethan Downing. We are over 90% compliant with mandatory training right now, so join the club.

This month is the NHS’ 70th birthday, with Thursday marked the big day itself. Linked to this message are details of how we are celebrating, and you should too! This is the best health service in the world, at its best, and we should be proud of what we achieve. The Trust is rated Outstanding for caring by the CQC – and that matters very much indeed.

#hellomynameis….Toby