Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 1 March
March 1, 2019
Happy St David’s Day! That means there is just one more month to go on the mandatory training countdown that you will appreciate the Trust has been on for a little while. As in 2014 when we began to make having an annual appraisal comprehensive, we are now intent to delivering each year the full statutory obligation for required training. With your payslip in January you will have received your own personal scorecard. Even if you think the data is wrong, that data is the information we hold about your status. It is your responsibility to both complete your training and ensure the data held centrally is accurate. We have a whole team in learning and development who are there to help, and this year we moved most of the training onto e-systems that can be accessed at work, at home, and on the move. So, if you are one of the 4,000 people we employ who is already 100% compliant, thank you for your efforts and organisation. If, like me, you have some work yet to do to be compliant please ensure that you make arrangements over the coming week to schedule that training or undertake it on-line. If you are paid through Agenda for Change you will not pass through your increment if you are not 100% compliant on our central database. If you are applying for consultant clinical excellence awards, the same obligation applies. And to be rated at a performance level of 3 or 4 in your Aspiring to Excellence 2018-19 PDR, which will take place in the next twelve weeks, you must have undertaken all of your mandatory training.
This week we held our regular monthly TeamTalk team brief. My short film feeding back on TeamTalk is out in staff comms, and you should have a face to face team meeting in the next four weeks that gives you the opportunity to talk, listen and engage with local and organisation wide issues. If you do not have access to, or do not know how to, attend such a session, do get in touch with either your group director of operations or with Ruth Wilkin or myself. MyConnect is great, Heartbeat is terrific, email comms is ok, but we know that face to face conversation matters most. As part of the work we are doing to support individuals and teams, it is so important to have that time. Last week I had the opportunity to talk with a fascinating group of frontline team leaders on our apprentice programme: It was very clear from their feedback that messages get lost or unintentionally distorted, and we need to do more to talk – only that face to face time helps answer the why questions that people have, as well as the what, how and when discussions that can dominate.
From next Friday we will issue a regular weekly update on Brexit preparedness within the Trust. Whatever is happening nationally, we need to make sure that it is understood internally, and explained to patients and visitors. The issue of medicines and equipment availability continues to dominate much discussion. Our Chief Pharmacist, Pun Sharma, and others have done a sterling job making sure we are well connected to the central purchasing arrangements. I am reassured that both getting medicines into the UK, and holding sufficient stock, is well planned. If you do have concerns on any aspect of Brexit readiness feel free to get in touch with me. Across our project team, which covers information governance, research trials, professional registration, fuel and energy purchasing and such like, we are confident we are well prepared, but it is always possible we have missed a local nuance. So, as ever, do speak up.
15 March is our next Quality Improvement Half Day. That date is important for a couple of reasons. All QIHD teams are required to submit and have accredited their efforts by the end of March. That was the shared learning topic in November and the countdown is on for around fifty teams who have not yet put in their application. If that is you do get in touch with Allison Binns and the governance team. The next QIHD will also see the formal launch of our arrangements for smoke free, which by now you surely know is 5 July. With that launch will come a comprehensive set of Frequently Asked Questions, and our answers, building on what you will have read in this month’s Heartbeat. As a Trust we are pro vaping, pro nicotine replacement and pro quitting smoking altogether. I mentioned a £3,000 saving last week that giving up could save you, and I know that dozens of colleagues in our Trust have taken the impending ban as a stimulus to try again to cut down, switch to vaping, or quit altogether. That is fantastic and we want to keep up that momentum as we move towards entirely smoke free sites, with shelters removed, and both wardens and cameras tracking our sites to make sure that no-one is smoking on our land.
A big thank you to everyone involved in our continued work on sepsis. 80% of patients who should have been screened last week, were screened, along with over 95% of patients who should have had a VTE assessment. Sepsis remains our top quality priority as we work to tackle avoidable harm and amenable mortality. Next week’s Board meeting will see a detailed presentation from David Carruthers of the improvements being made and the work being done. Infections, including sepsis, remain our biggest opportunity to make a difference, although it is also the case that better identification of patients who are expected to die will help our comparative data. After improvements in recent years, that identification gap is especially true at weekends. It is also at weekends when we sometimes struggle with rapid release arrangements, which is a key issue for many in our local community whose faith or culture obliges certain timescales for burial. Later in March, we will issue revised guidance to address this small but important gap in the way that we work.
Finally, we continue to make decent progress with recruitment. We have a team out in Australia now sourcing more recruits (often Brits returning). And this week we are adding to our paediatric consultant team. The year ahead will see exciting changes at the Trust in children’s services, as we get ready for Midland Met and respond to our forthcoming CQC report. We are determined to make sure that children presenting as emergencies get the very best care from our A&E and paediatric teams, and that specialist surgery is undertaken by teams who are typically experienced in the care of children. We are just a month too from taking over the school nursing contract and Cheryl Newton joins us shortly as the new Group Director of Nursing for paediatrics. With a £1.5m investment in new neonatal facilities, I am heartened by the progress we are making and hope you are too. In the long term, however, it will be childhood obesity that defines the health status of our local population and there is more yet to plan to do, let alone deliver, before we can be confident about our outcomes in 2030.
Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 1 March 2019
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