Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 1 March

March 1, 2024

I’d like to start my message this week with a thank you. Wednesday saw the final day of five days on industrial action by our non-consultant doctors. As I have said before, we are (sadly) getting accustomed to planning for industrial action, our rota coordinators and clinical and operational managers work incredibly hard to ensure any gaps in rotas are filled and that we can continue to provide safe care across our sites. Then our consultant colleagues, ACPs and other colleagues cover those tiring shifts to deliver that care. Our planning balanced the need to ensure safe delivery of care for our urgent and emergency care services and the need to care for patients on our elective waiting lists.

I am under no illusions as to the toll continued industrial action is having on our whole workforce, and staff wellbeing was at the centre of our planning. The executive team and senior managers have ensured regular welfare checks, including out of hours and I know this has been appreciated by our frontline teams. As always, thank you to everyone for your efforts, we have continued to keep our staff and our patients safe, and during these five days, we have ensured that no patients on a cancer pathway have been cancelled.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this will be the last round of industrial action, so if there are things you think we could do better, please do let me know.

At our Trust Management Committee earlier this week, one of the topics we discussed was the results of our annual staff survey and quarterly pulse survey – these results are under embargo until next Thursday (7 March) when we will share them with you, and, more importantly, what we will be doing about them. When asking you to complete the survey, we made our SWB promise to you, that we would listen and act on your feedback, and we 100% are – my message next week will set this out in much more detail.

Our performance and insight team have worked hard (thank you) to break down the responses and give the Board and our senior leadership teams some valuable data and insight into your experiences of working at SWB. One of the things that really struck me when I was reading through the reports, was the difference in the experience of colleagues of non-white British ethnicity, when compared to colleagues who are white British. The responses show that areas of concern are significantly higher from these colleagues, this is something that we must not and won’t ignore. Put bluntly, any well-intentioned work we have done thus far on tackling this lived experience has been insufficient.

The NHS workforce is more diverse now than any other point in our 75-year history and is built on values of dignity and respect, compassion, improving lives and everyone counts. I want to be chief executive of an organisation where the make-up of our workforce is more representative of the community it serves and ensuring that SWB is a place where colleagues feel they belong, can safely raise concerns, ask questions, and are treated equally, regardless of their background or role. Having an inclusive culture means that we will retain colleagues, grow our workforce, deliver culturally safe services, and deliver the ambitions that we set out in our 3ps strategy.

If you were on TeamTalk earlier this week, you would have heard our Interim Chief People Officer, James Fleet, discuss plans for us to re-invigorate our staff inclusion networks, to empower inclusion for colleagues across the organisation, influence and shape our strategic agenda, inform senior level decision- making and drive meaningful change, as well as providing a safe space for individuals to come together, share ideas, raise awareness of challenges and provide support to each other.

This was already high on our agenda, but the results from the survey has seen this work escalated. James, alongside our Deputy Chair, Lesley Writtle, recently met with the chairs of the networks to discuss how we can support them to move forwards and have a bigger impact.

We have committed to:

Having a network chair and deputy chair in place with some protected time
A committed and active non-executive and executive sponsor for each network
Effective communications
Dedicated admin support

And we will be looking to implement these enablers as soon as possible.

There will also be opportunities for you to get involved in the networks, as we will shortly be advertising vacancies for chair and vice-chair roles, so please do look at these roles when they come out, it’s a great way of getting involved in strategic work and helping to create change for your colleagues. We want to make our staff inclusion networks some of the very best in the NHS – and there are currently over 700 registered networks – so we are setting our sites high.

EDI is not just at the heart of what we are doing here in SWB, in June last year, NHS England published their equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) improvement plan which you can read here and the Black Country Integrated Care System will shortly be publishing their four-year workforce EDI strategy – this will set out how all the organisations within the system will improve the experience of staff from protected groups. This is supported by all the chief executives across the system, in fact, just yesterday I filmed my part in an introduction video, explaining the six strategy pledges in further detail. Do keep an eye out for this video and more on the strategy.

This is just a small part of the work around EDI, and I hope it offers some level of assurance that issues are being addressed. My plea to you, is that if you do experience any form of discrimination within this organisation, please do speak up about it, please don’t wait until the staff survey to put your views across. There are many ways in which you can raise these issues, via your line manager, our inclusion networks, our Freedom to Speak Up Guardians and of course you can speak to any member of the executive team. Please don’t stay silent on such an important matter.

Finally, I am pleased to announce the launch of our food and retail survey, designed to capture your feedback and insights regarding the services we provide across all our sites, including what you would like to see at Midland Met when it opens. This survey seeks insight into your experiences, preferences, and aspirations concerning the food and retail services available across all our sites. We want to understand what you like about our current offerings and, equally important, what you would like to see in the future.

Your responses will play a vital role in guiding our decisions. The survey is easy to access and complete, plus you’ll be helping to shape the services we offer. The survey is open to colleagues, patients, and stakeholders and can be accessed here – https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SWBretail