Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 5 April

April 5, 2024

Dear colleagues,

Happy new financial year! – one which promises to be the most exciting in the history of SWB – the year we will open the doors to our brand-new acute hospital – Midland Metropolitan University Hospital.

Midland Met is a wonderful building, but it is nothing with passionate and dedicated people, who are committed to delivering outstanding care to the people of Sandwell and West Birmingham – and we have those in abundance within our organisation.

So, it is vitally important that we make sure that SWB is the best place it can be for you to work.

We recently informed you of our People Plan objectives for 2024/25 – based on your feedback in the staff survey – and I wanted to now let you know what the next steps are in our staff engagement and experience improvement journey.

People Engagement Teams – PETs
In March, we held an event to officially launch our People Engagement Teams. These are groups of colleagues, from different roles, backgrounds, and bands, who will come together to drive forward improvements for people within their area.

Each clinical group and corporate directorate will have People Engagement Team and they will be supported by our improvement, organisation development and our comms team.

I am excited to see how these teams develop, and I know that one or two of them have already held their first meeting which is fantastic – you will start to hear more about these PETs soon – you can also watch this short animation to find out more about what they are.

Local Objectives
One of the first tasks that the People Engagement Teams will have, is to develop local improvement objectives, based on the results of the staff survey. These are separate to our corporate People Plan objectives and are more focused on local improvement, rather than at a Trust-wide level.

Pulse Survey

The Q1 Pulse Survey has launched today and is our first opportunity to ‘check-in’ following the annual staff survey – this is part of our year-round approach to talking about the staff survey.

In January, we achieved a response rate of 40 per cent – which is our highest ever as an organisation and one of the highest response rates in the Midlands region as a whole – this time, we want to try and achieve 45% – so please do take just five minutes to complete it.

You can click on the link below – it will ask for your e-mail address, but this is just to authenticate you as a member of staff – it is not to identify your answers – the survey is 100% anonymous, I, nor any other member of staff in the organisation will know who has said what.

Please do prioritise giving us your feedback.

https://picker.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b8cMes96Xg3Nk1g?&Trust%20Code=RXK

I started my message by saying what a wonderful building Midland Met is, but it looks so much better now we can start to have ‘our people’ inside. In her message last week, Mel Roberts, our Chief Nurse, touched on ‘soft-activation’ and what this means, but on Tuesday this week, some of our ward services colleagues were the very first SWB employees (not working on the programme itself) to start working within Midland Met – without a bit of PPE in sight. They were doing a clinical clean in the pathology department, ready for the first bit of equipment being delivered.

You can see more of what they got up to here: Add soft activation videos

Have a lovely weekend.

Kind regards,

Richard