Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 9 February
February 9, 2024
Our People Plan sets out our commitment to cultivate and sustain happy, productive, and engaged staff, ensuring the best possible experience for our staff and patients. To helps us achieve this, there are key programmes of work taking place, including the below:
- Embedding our ARC (ambition, respect, compassion) values and behaviours in everything we do as an organisation – in recruitment, appraisal and leadership practice.
- Ensuring our leaders understand the importance of compassionate and inclusive leadership, through the delivery of our ARC leadership programme.
- Supporting our teams to work effectively through the ARC team effectiveness programme. This programme has a focus on both embedding our values and supporting high performance compassionate and inclusive team working.
As part of our transition to MMUH, we recognised the need to consolidate the delivery of our leadership and team effectiveness programmes at team level and to ensure there is targeted support for our key high priority services which need to radically change before the move to the new hospital. Therefore, I am really pleased that the executive team and Trust Board has been able to prioritise investment in delivering high impact organisation development support for the key priorities linked to MMUH:
- Leadership development
- Team effectiveness
- Enabling new ways of working
I started the week by talking this through with teams from Medicine, Surgery and Imaging and we discussed the positive impact that effective teamwork has on patient care and experience. It was an energetic conversation, and one that emphasises the opportunity we all have, to look after our staff, our patients, and make a positive impact on the communities we serve – our 3ps (patients, people, population) in action right there.
The leadership and team development work will help with the development of a compassionate culture and should, if colleagues engage with it well, impact positively on staff and patient experience. Most importantly teams are shaping their own change journey to address the improvements relevant to their own area and team. There is a range of support (link below) in place for teams, leaders and managers, the links are below. In addition, please look out for further Organisation Development roadshows and engagement events coming soon.
And it’s not just linked to teams moving to Midland Met, the new hospital will bring change for us all. Everyone plays a part, so even if you and your team are not directly moving to Midland Met, please do still take a look at the support on offer. You are all vital to making the Midland Met care model tick.
OD consultancy support request, please return to catherine.griffiths27@nhs.net
On the subject of looking after our staff, I am aware that there have been some issues in accessing occupational health recently, and I wanted to reassure you that the executive team, alongside the People and OD team are working hard behind the scenes to bolster cover whilst recruitment continues to provide full capacity for the service. If you have any urgent occupational health requirements, please discuss this with your operational HR manager who will be able to recommend the next steps.
This week is national apprenticeships week, and it has been great to see our apprenticeship team out and about promoting all the opportunities that are available for you all here at SWB. I visited imaging yesterday, and there was a lot of excitement about their new radiographer apprenticeship positions. Apprenticeships not only offer an entry route into the NHS, which is so important for our workforce of the future but gone are the days when they are solely for young people. There are so many opportunities now to undertake training and progress your career. I was particularly inspired by Amanda Healey’s story. Amanda left school when she was 15, with no qualifications at all. After working in a factory and a bakery, she joined SWB in 2008 as a ward services officer. She has since completed a level 2, level 3, level 4, and level 5 apprenticeship and now works in maternity as a foetal medicine maternity support worker. You can watch her story here and I am sure you will be as inspired as I was.
For more information on apprenticeships opportunities, please visit the team’s Connect page: Apprenticeships Home Page (swbh.nhs.uk)
Finally, good communication is key to ensuring that you feel engaged, happy, and involved at work, so we want your thoughts on how we are doing and how we could improve. Please do take five minutes of your time to fill in this short survey on our internal communications channels: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/swbinternalcommsreview