Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 4 October
October 6, 2024
Hello, colleagues.
Well – the day has finally arrived. By the time many of you read this message, we will be moving into our new hospital, the Midland Met (MMUH). Patient moves from Sandwell Hospital to MMUH start at 0700 on Sunday. At our peak, we will be safely transferring one patient every two minutes. There will then follow a bedding in period of a few weeks before we move maternity and neonatal services on 6th November and then finally, City Hospital patients on 10th November.
This is a momentous occasion in so many ways. For the NHS nationally, this is significant because this is only the second brand new, complete acute hospital to have opened in the English NHS in the last decade. For the Birmingham and Black Country areas, this is significant because for too long, our communities, many of whom have significant population health challenges, have deserved better services and better hospital estate to care for them when they are ill. For you, our colleagues, and staff, this is momentous either because many of you will have worked at the Sandwell or City Hospitals for decades, or just because the very process of changing your work location and/or your role, will be a life changing event. I do not underestimate the range of emotions that you will be experiencing at the moment, but I do hope that you are all embracing this change and are in overall terms, as excited about it as I am. Some emotional farewells are being made, both to Sandwell itself but also between colleagues, some of whom won’t be working together in our new arrangements and have done so for many years.
The process of getting to this point has not been easy. The delays experienced decades ago in identifying the site and starting to develop the business case for capital investment. The collapse of Carillion, our first building contractor and the subsequent delays experienced in securing the investment to finish the job. The issues Balfour Beatty had in securing materials and contractual labour during COVID and post-Brexit were also a huge challenge. The biggest challenge we have faced, however, has been re-designing our clinical services to ensure we were offering best practice healthcare to our patients – the MMUH Care Model. The effort that literally hundreds of colleagues have put in to changing clinical pathways, avoiding unnecessary attendance and admission, building 7-day Consultant-led services, and working out how existing services can operate in a radically different environment, has been phenomenal. How colleagues have managed their “day to day” clinical or managerial workloads, while working through designing a new future, has been humbling. Thank you to everyone who has contributed.
On the subject of saying thank you, there are hundreds of individuals or teams who deserve recognition and thanks for their efforts to get us to this point. A few that spring to mind for me are: The MMUH programme Team and all those involved in programme management, clinical change and hospital activation; our domestic services and catering teams who have done so much to clean the hospital and ensure we can continue to feed patients and staff seamlessly; our Clinical group and Directorate leaders for all of their work on staffing availability, job planning and rostering for this brave new world; our estates team, EQUANS colleagues and their colleagues from our building contractor, Balfour Beatty; our colleagues from Siemens; all colleagues involved in the complete redesign of our logistics service. These are just a few of the teams that we could not have managed without.
My thoughts are now already turning to the future and how we realise the benefits of our new care model and hospital, so we can, in essence, justify the £750 million of public money which has been spent on it. The Trust will be reviewing and refreshing its strategy for a post-MMUH world, but there are more immediate, less strategic considerations I want all colleagues to think about. Put simply, we simply must not cut and paste our existing processes and approaches, into a new building and expect it to work better. It won’t. We have redesigned our clinical services – now we must make the most of improved acute hospital staffing and care models and the separation of elective care from emergency care to improve the efficiency of our services and of course, the quality and safety of our services. Our performance against important waiting time standards, emergency care access standards, internal quality standards between specialities and our ability to generate more income by getting waiting times down, all need to improve significantly. Our current reasons or excuses for not doing so, will have largely been removed in the next few weeks. Let’s aspire to delivering better healthcare and achieve that ambition.
See you on the other side!
Richard