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Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 1 December

December 1, 2023

As many of you will be aware, the NHS Act of 2022 mandated NHS Trusts to collaborate with other Trusts to ensure that benefits for patients were maximised in the future. Our Trust is part of the Black Country Provider Collaborative (BCPS), in which we work in partnership with The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, on matters in which patients and or colleagues will benefit and where we think that working together will ensure that we are greater than the sum of our parts.  Our Trust Chair, Sir David Nicholson, also chairs the collaborative.

Since 2021, the BCPC has developed a programme of clinical collaboration between specialities, as well as corporate collaboration in areas such as payroll, procurement, and human resources. The purpose of this work is to collaboratively tackle things like:

  1.  Clinical service resilience issues – workforce resilience or lack of clinical critical mass
  2. Efficiency/productivity best practice sharing on matters like Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) or on corporate support services
  3. Delivery of elective/waiting time recovery through mutual aid
  4. Workforce planning collaboration – recruitment, bank/agency protocols etc
  5. Financial recovery delivery as a system

To help us to manage this work more effectively, the BCPC has asked for expressions of interest from executive directors across the four organisations, to become the lead subject matter experts for their respective fields and to help Trusts coordinate work between them.

I am delighted that we have three of our SWB executive directors who have been asked and agreed to take on these wider leadership roles within the BCPS. Chief Nursing Officer, Mel Roberts, Chief Governance Officer, Kam Dhami and Chief Finance Officer, Dinah McLannahan will lead the development in their respective roles, nursing/midwifery/AHPs, governance and finance.

It’s really pleasing to see our organisation so well represented at this level and I will of cause bring you regular updates on the progress of the BCPC.

Whilst Kam and Mel will take on these roles as an addition to their substantive position here at SWB, Dinah’s role is slightly different, she will be joining the BCPC on a fulltime basis as a 15-month secondment. This reflects the scale of the financial challenges we currently face as a system and changes to the ways we work across collaboratively that require careful financial planning.

I would like to thank Dinah for her leadership here at SWB over the last six years and wish her every success in this new role. Simon Sheppard, Director of Operational Finance at the Trust, will become our chief finance officer during this time to ensure continuity of service and leadership of finance and planning here at SWB.

Finally, thank you to everyone who have been involved in our Winter Ambition focus week which has been taking place at City Hospital. Our improvement team have been embedded into our emergency department and across our medical wards, looking at areas of good practice that we can share across the organisation and any areas in which they think we could improve our performance, which we know will positively both patients and colleagues. Next week their focus will be on Sandwell Hospital.

Have a good weekend.

Richard.