Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 25 October
October 25, 2024
This week I wanted to share some important feedback with our teams. Thanks to everyone for their hard work and continued resilience moving into the new hospital. This has presented several challenges. Some of these challenges relate to our teams having done 6 months’ worth of activation and induction work in 6 weeks. Some of them relate to the building, some of them to how we wish to operate within the building. In addition, I am very conscious of how urgent care services have been under significant strain. We must remember we haven’t delivered our City Hospital move to MMUH yet and as such, the seven-day care model and workforce resilience is yet to kick in.
Listening to and responding to your feedback is imperative for us and I want to assure you that we will do so.
For example, we understand agile working is a different way of working for us all and we are working on making pragmatic changes to the agile working approach in this new working environment. What I would ask is you be kind and supportive to colleagues and use the booking system to book a desk area if you need one or work across our other sites if you don’t need to be at MMUH specifically. In addition, we understand signage in some areas may need to be improved/reworked. A wayfinding working group has quickly been set up to monitor and develop this work and we will highlight updates to the organisation as we have them. We have also heard from colleagues about more working areas and will be looking at the Winter Garden “pods” as areas to use and book in the future.
As part of our settling in period and as we prepare for our upcoming moves, we would like to hear your feedback. There is a short survey to complete which will enable to capture your views about the settling period – please complete it would be very useful . https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/midlandmet.
With all of this in the background I would remind colleagues, that our move to MMUH is still not fully complete, so there will be, and are some moving issues that we need to get right and be mindful of during the next two key move dates. As the new hospital remains half open, with our next moves taking place on 6 November (maternity, neonates and gynae) and 10 November (rest of City Hospital) whilst we are still commissioning some of these areas, some equipment has already been put out in preparation for these moves. Please do not take items just because an area isn’t open. If you are missing equipment, please raise it via the correct routes and it will be fixed. We run the risk of being short of vital equipment for our next moves if colleagues move/take equipment that is not theirs to take .
I also wanted in this week’s message to allude to two more things. Firstly, earlier in September, Lord Darzi published his independent review of the NHS which was intended to start and open and honest conversation about the state of the NHS and the reforms needed Lord Darzi published his independent review of the NHS, this also lends itself to wanting to share open and honest feedback. With this in mind, I would urge colleagues to ensure that they complete their NHS Staff Survey. I am also pleased to say that our response to National Staff Survey has increased this week to 17 per cent, however, this is still lower than when we would expect it to be and much lower than most Trusts. If you have been sent an email, please respond as soon as you can, and we will continue to share benchmarking and how we are doing as an organisation as we move forward. If you have not received your link or have any issues please swbh.comms@nhs.net.
Secondly, a reminder and one of some urgency we must as a Trust ensure that we hit our 65 week trajectory for elective care and meet the route to zero in November. This is a non-negotiable national ask, and is absolutely the right thing to do for our patients. Please do everything you can in your area of speciality to ensure we are on target for this.
Finally, this month is Freedom to Speak Up Month and I want to thank our FTSU Guardians who do a fantastic job. In addition, tomorrow you are able to join the first ever Black Country FTSU Conference. Staff from across our local Black Country Integrated Care System are invited to attend this key event as part of our commitment to make speaking up business as usual for everyone. The conference will take place on Friday 25 October, 9am – 3.30pm via the Microsoft Teams platform and there will be inspiring talks from a range of speakers. The conference will focus on the power of listening and encouraging everyone to feel confident to speak up. In case you missed it, be sure to check out this video featuring colleagues from across the Black Country talking about the importance of speaking up.
On a final note, I would like to say a huge thank you and good luck to Martin Sadler, Executive Director for IT & Digital, who leaves us to join Birmingham City Council. Martin’s legacy is a strong one, with a strong focus on customer service and responsiveness. Mark Taylor will be Interim Director of IT and Digital reporting through to Dave Baker, Chief Strategy Officer for a fixed term period and we are very much looking forward to Mark being in the role. Martin’s role as FTSU executive lead will also be passed onto to Mark Anderson, Chief Medical Officer who is very much looking forward to supporting the work the FTSU team and guardians do/undertake.