Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 24 August
August 24, 2018
Last week I wrote about our Midland Met certainty and the overwhelming efforts to resolve uncertainties over our IT. That work continues – as Wednesday’s N3 outage showed – and more than 400 installations have now taken place to step up our WiFi capability. 600 computers are en route. And we have finalised a schedule of planned downtime to allow external experts and our own team to sort out infrastructure issues which have partly responsible for recent difficulties. All a step forward. Next week, through Team Talk we will be asking everyone in our Trust to help prioritise some key priorities to make working in our Trust a little simpler or easier. Part of work to build engagement and involvement. Look out for next week’s special purple edition of Heartbeat for more details.
Informatics Dashboard 24 August 2018
We now know with moderate certainty that the Care Quality Commission will be on our sites during September. This is very welcome. It is a chance to showcase some fantastic work in BMEC, at Rowley Regis, across medicine and in theatres to improve standards. We can demonstrate the benefits of our safety plan. And show efforts to tackle waits in emergency care and that Sepsis is our number one quality priority. Of course we should be open about our challenges – not just IT, but gaps in teams and service specific issues like paediatric ophthalmology. It would though be really disappointing if our incident reporting, risk registers and Speak Up processes have not already captured the key issues as you see them. Staff comms this week has highlighted some staff meetings that the CQC asked us, this week, to organise as part of their preparation. (CQC We want to hear from you poster). The well led inspection, which tests the Board and executive, will take place on October 9th, 10th and 11th. I am sure that the unannounced service visits will happen before then – day or night.
This week saw the first formal Board meeting of our local Healthy Lives Partnership. This is the Integrated Care, or accountable care, variant for Sandwell and the west of Birmingham. Our two geographies will each have a provider alliance put in place, and the Trust will intend to take on long term care contracts, and some demand risk, in trying to move to a more coordinated model of care and one which targets more resource at a risk stratified population. I have explicitly linked the good news about Midland Met with a commitment from our board that in the next decade we want to see a bigger proportion of local funds invested in mental health and primary care. I do understand that many staff in our Trust are concerned to make sure that spend is wise and evidenced. We can show in our End of Life Care model that we can add value coordinating the efforts of others. That is a trailblazer for work we will do in other fields like alcohol, frailty and child health.
The great news about Midland Met does not mean we can or will keep everything the same. Next year we will invest to make sure that our “retained” or interim estate is up to scratch at City. But this week our quality and sustainability group met again to develop the final reconfiguration options for acute care. This will see some services move from Sandwell to City, en route to Midland Met. This is a bold step but one that gives us chance to begin to build the teams and care models that the new hospital demands. It will also help us to jump forward work to make sure that a “Midland Met population” living across borough boundaries have access to the same quality of liaison psychiatry, community health, or care home access. Everyone involved understands that the diversity and inequity of these services is a key risk to the functioning of the new build, and a key issue for us to address. It must be possible for Birmingham led services to reach into Sandwell, and Sandwell services to deliver equally well either side of the M5. The interim reconfiguration in 2019 will help to make sure that that happens.
Thank you to everyone working over the bank holiday weekend. As we welcome back the CQC we should recognise that our Trust was rated Outstanding for Caring in 2017. I see no reason that we cannot keep mantle, and that success is down to all of you.
#hellomynameis….Toby