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Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 27 January

January 27, 2023

This week, the Midland Met Programme Company senior team and I have been putting the finishing touches to a detailed document and slide deck, which sets out the evidence about the history of, the workforce model for, the activity numbers for and the revenue consequences of, this once in a generation development. The document is hugely important, because it is the basis of what we will be using to inform both of our Integrated Care Board (ICB) members and fellow system Chief Executives, about the Midland Met, which will be opening in 2024.

Much has changed since the Midland Met business case and assumptions were last reviewed and revised in 2019.  As an illustration:

  • The COVID-19 pandemic, has shifted IPC practice and had a profound impact on workforce numbers, patient flow and productivity
  • National best practice in acute care has shifted significantly – for example same day emergency care, admission avoidance, virtual wards and more resilience in acute medicine, 7 days per week – these are now the expected norms for the here and now, let alone in a ground-breaking hospital development which will open in 2024
  • There have been permanent shifts in activity, previously not assumed – for example, the increase in ambulance activity and consequently admissions to SWB, from, East and North Birmingham postcodes
  • Our cost base and numbers of staff directly employed by the Trust, has increased by 12% since 2019, thus impacting on the discussions with our ICBs about affordability, given little latitude in NHS commissioning budgets for “developments”

We have a task on our hands to take ICB Board members through the history of the Midland Met, its care model and critically, its benefits. If we are going to ask our ICBs for more money when the NHS locally has little to spare, and then explain to other NHS Trusts that every extra pound given to our Trust means one less pound for their Trusts, then the articulation of the benefits of the MMUH needs to be detailed, and sophisticated. We have a dedicated workstream starting to set out quantifiable benefits of the MMUH, in the short, medium and long term. We all need to understand those as colleagues at SWB, as we all have the exciting task of talking them up but then the unenviable task of delivering them.

I will share with you what we calculate the MMUH benefits will be, very soon.

Have a good week.

Richard