Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 7 December
December 7, 2018
Of course December is a month of celebration. Over coming days we have festival lunches in our restaurants and moments of reflection in our chapels, so look out for those in the communications bulletin, or on myConnect. Nearly 2,000 colleagues now use this free app to get information about our organisation and our community. It’s easy to join them, simply search for SWBH myConnect on the Apple App Store or on the Google Play Store.
Yesterday, our Chairman Richard Samuda hosted his annual party, in the viewing room overlooking Midland Met. If you drive past the site over coming days you will see the illuminations that Balfour Beatty have installed, as they work through the holidays to put up the steel and glassworks for the Winter Garden. Although the design is final, and we all hope the opening date is too, there remains a chance to influence the building in small but important ways – what physical fitness equipment could we install to support wellbeing, what locker arrangements might be put in to make working in the hospital easier. We will not have smoking shelters, because we go smoke free on 5 July 2019, but how can we best support people switching over to vaping as part of giving up for good? Do pitch to me or to Jayne Dunn or to Alan Kenny your thoughts and hopes. We have waited long enough, the facility needs to be the best of our Trust.
In Heartbeat you will find lots of details about our amazing 2018 QIHD competition. We crowned the winners yesterday, with 13 entries shortlisted from 65 brilliant submissions. They are all back on Connect, and in our Education Centre at Sandwell, and in January the posters go on tour across our sites. By then the QIHD dates for 2019/20 will have been released, and that is a good excuse to really think about how you use your QIHD time, how you gain your accreditation, and what your 2019 entry in next year’s welearn poster contest will be. The top prize of £5,000 was awarded to the Think Drink poster from our anaesthetic and theatre teams. My congratulations to the team for not only putting in place a simple yet vital solution, but also for listening so clearly to their patients’ voice, and for producing an engaging and evidenced poster entry. The standard has been set. Let’s all resolve in the New Year to best that bar.
Tying together the best of our best and the Midland Met, was the latest update to our Board from the R&D community, led by Professor Karim Raza. In five years’ service in that role, Karim has helped to transform the place of research in our organisation. The award given to us earlier this year by the West Midlands Clinical Research Network, is testimony to that success. Early in 2019 we open our clinical research facility near outpatients at Sandwell. This is a moment to consider how best we develop research ideas and spread the research reach in our Trust into new specialties and teams. But the main conclusion of the Board’s review was that this is also the moment to come together with primary care partners and make sure that access to trial medicine and translational research is a shared project from general practice into our work, and vice versa. I know that we will look to invest in ideas in that domain in the next two years as we build towards Midland Met. The main entrance to the new hospital is entirely devoted to research and learning, with a huge gallery space allocated to display and celebrate the knowledge and innovation inside this organisation. welearn is not a one off contest, it is a cultural intention to improve quality in our midst. Kam Dhami will bring the executive’s proposals for the 2019 welearn programme to the Board in February to chart the next steps in that journey.
The other focus of the Board this month was on Imaging. The team have worked hard to clear a backlog of results to report, just as specialty leads are working to clear a backlog of results to be acknowledged. When we go live with Unity results acknowledgement should become simpler, but the need to do so in real time will become mandatory, for obvious safety reasons. We agreed to invest over £1m in the future of radiology services here. I met the CCG governing body on Wednesday and it was clear there, as at CLE, that clinicians need certainty about the time from test to report. We can save fruitless visits to GP surgeries and we can improve our bed flow too if we can get this right, whilst at the same time looking at new technologies like AI to mitigate the national shortage of radiologists and the training lag for reporting radiographers. From April we will work with at least one major strategic partner to give us capacity to report CT and MRI in house and to rely more on a partner for plain film reporting. Just as we have focused on sustainable pathology services by founding the Black Country Pathology service, we want in 2019 to create region-leading imaging capabilities and capacity in our system. With rising expectations around cancer diagnosis, we need to act now to be ready for 2020, not just for lung cancer services but more widely.
I hope you share the excitement of the senior leadership about the future opportunities we have, and about the talent in our midst.
The printer team are out and about fixing printers where you work, so do report issues and difficulties to the help desk. Today is the 13th day without a major IT outage, but I know we have more to do to make sure we have banished the IT problems we have had since 2016 over the year ahead. We need optimism and realism in equal measure! As you aware we are looking to go-live with Unity next year, I attach an announcement regarding the full dress rehearsal of Unity which will take place on 11 February 2019.
Attached are this week’s IT statistics: IT Performance Stats 7 December 2018
Over 150 colleagues get set for the full dress rehearsal of Unity