Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 31 August
August 31, 2018
We expect to have the CQC (Care Quality Commission) on our sites over the next four weeks. They are here to see if we have progressed from 2017 and whether we have yet achieved the Good rating that we are striving for. You know that 70% of our services are currently rated as good or outstanding. Next week the Trust Board meets at Rowley Regis, and I know that our community ward teams there are determined to demonstrate to them and to the CQC the huge progress made since the last inspection. Of course our medical wards and surgical services are under sustained pressure, but recruitment has been strong, vacancies have fallen, and the Safety Plan data shows improvements in care. The feedback I hear from patients and from you is that ward multi professional working and documentation is very different to 2017, as our consistency of care work has engaged everyone in trying to find ways to ensure, shift by shift, that care is of good quality and personalised.
Most of the week is “out of hours”. Some of our teams only work for us in those hours. Our patients are with us 24/7. So today’s early hours go-see inspections were an important part of how we work. It is good news that the hospital sites’ wards felt like it was night-time. Calm and restful. We have worked hard to reduce overnight moves of patients to try and get a decent night’s sleep. That is an important part of care and health, and earlier this year the Board heard from a patient whose time with us was sleep deprived. Good too that teams in theatres were so welcoming to the inspection and challenged appropriately who folk were, and why they were there. There remains work to do on trolley security for drugs and paper files on wards, and on resus trolley checks. If you are reading this and work on one of our wards, please take the initiative and talk with your colleagues about shift by shift checks and improvements.
“Out of hours” is also a big part of the work we want to do now on improving communication. Part of that is ensuring great handover and appropriate transitions of care. Ten days we changed the process for bed-side handover between ED and acute medicine to improve quality. We are working to see what more we could do to make inter-site transfers work well. And the image uploading link to the trauma centre needs more work. But line managers are also being asked to ensure that anyone that works outside daytime hours is clearly part of the team, hears news and messages and practice changes, and has equal access to training and development work. I suspect this obvious issue is not yet our strongest suit and I know that our group Director of Nursing are looking for good practice across our sites, so speak up.
Like every recent Friday message, I have to mention IT. Last weekend we lost functionality, and I very much hope that the work done this week on N3 and on our servers, sustains through this weekend. The remaining technical fix for our wifi solution is being tested in coming days. We need that wifi for Unity, and we will go live with Unity when we are ready. The full dress rehearsal is coming up. Whenever we go live, having everyone trained is vital. If you have not booked in for your Unity training this is pretty much your final call! Out of hours of course our IT resilience is less as our support cover is different. For gold, silver and bronze IT systems we are agreeing in the next fortnight what revised and improved cover we need to better support teams when things go wrong. The latest performance stats are here.
Pathology is a key dependency for so much of the work we do. This time next week we expect to confirm the transfer of undertakings conditions have been to create Black Country Pathology in October. Our services here will change gradually but they will change and I want to record our thanks to everyone working across our laboratories for your service and for putting up with a messy and sometimes frustrating change programme. BCP does offer us, to my twin themes, new IT in 2019, and it should offer us in time better out of hours resilience. But its success will depend on people and on leadership.
On Sunday, notwithstanding the leadership, our team of cricketers will do our best to retain the Midland Met trophy against local GPs. The forecast this time is sunshine, so if you have a free Sunday afternoon, do join us at Dartmouth Cricket Club in West Bromwich for the annual match. Good luck too to those taking part next week in the Trust’s annual cycle ride – details in staff comms about sponsorship. Come back in one piece!
#hellomynameis….Toby