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Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 22 September

September 22, 2023

Last week the Board had the usual packed agenda discussing the breadth of the Trust’s programme of work. In this message, I’d like to highlight, two points of discussion – prioritising the way we work and ensuring we have the right processes in place to support colleagues when they raise concerns.

Our organisation is currently facing multiple demands that are amplified due to the scale and depth of the Midland Met programme of work. These challenges are being met by the same small group of leaders in clinical and operational roles – to redesign services, handle the management of change programme as well as deliver elective and urgent care recovery plus handling industrial action.

During August I met every executive team member and the leadership teams of all five of our clinical groups and set out the priorities I would be holding them account to in addition to the business-as-usual expectations.

The three priorities are:

  1. Deliver the MMUH programme workstream requirements to secure service transformation, service quality/safety, workforce engagement and preparedness and deliver the early stages of the strong MMUH benefits case.
  2. Deliver our financial recovery plan, to assure the public we are managing public money wisely and do not materially harm our or our host system’s ability to secure additional revenue or capital funding for longer term investment in our IT, our estate, or our workforce, by virtue of being in significant deficit.
  3. Deliver improved workforce optimisation through a clear recruitment plan, improved attendance management and agency/locum discipline, thereby enabling better safety and continuity of care in our services and ensuring we have the right ground conditions in place on which to “land” the MMUH next year.

It is these three priorities which we now need to assess our 14 annual plan objectives against. The Board was in support of this and now each subcommittee will assess their own oversight of our annual plan objectives against those three filters.

Following the Lucy Letby verdict, our focus is now heavily on strengthening our freedom to speak up service and ensuring it’s effective. We’re already well underway with making sure we expand the freedom to speak up arrangements in the organisation as well as ensuring that it is a listening service and a hearing service and that it’s well embedded. You may already have seen our interim freedom to speak up lead, Jamil Johnson out and about raising awareness.

I’m pleased to report we now have 14 freedom to speak up guardians (representing a wide spectrum of professions across SWB), which is the most we’ve ever had in the organisation. And we will have 21 when we have onboarded everyone who has expressed an interest.

We want you to feel safe to raise any issues of concern. Connect has more information on the guardians and how they can support you.

This week, along with other senior colleagues, I have been overseeing our continued collective response to the consultants and non-consultant doctors’ industrial action.  I have been impressed again by the relatively calm and professional approach everyone has taken to dealing with the unprecedented nature of this week.  It is causing untold disruption to patients.  It is harming staff morale.  It is harming the reputation of the NHS with the wider public, at a time when such a knock in confidence can be ill-afforded.  All I wanted to say was a heartfelt thank you to all those who have contributed to making this week as harm-free and as smooth as it mainly has been.  I won’t forget your contributions.

Have a good week.