Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 11 October
October 11, 2019
Thank you to everyone who took part in last week’s #getMMHdone social media comment. I am very sure that we are making progress. The capital funding to complete our respiratory reconfiguration and installation this winter of our new Children’s A&E at City is in place. Next week the Board will determine the preferred facilities management supplier for Midland Met. In November, we will do the same for our wider estate functions for 2022. And the work to get a deal by the end of October with Balfour Beatty continues. With an announcement anticipated in coming weeks from Treasury, we do finally seem set to get back on track after the collapse of Carillion in 2018. Let’s be optimistic and begin to turn our minds to the kind of preparation that we kick off in 2020 to make the new hospital truly remarkable.
I know very well that it has been a really tough few days, not only in our emergency departments but across community wards, and hospital teams like Lyndon 4 and D5/7. We are looking after a lot of extremely unwell people and our ability to get people safely unloaded from ambulances much faster than our neighbours can mean we end up feeling overwhelmed. I hope that everyone working and managing these situations night and day feels supported, appreciated and valued. If you do not, do get in touch as I want to see what more or what differently we can do to take care of one another, with the same spirit of togetherness with which we approached Unity.
Unity was not a weekend or a fortnight, but is a way of working with our technology, and our patients’ data, that has the ability to help us to improve what we do. This week has seen continued focus on making sure every call logged since 21 September has been dealt with. We are down to fewer than five queries from September now (and almost 5,000 dealt with), and a few dozen enquiries from this month so far. This has been our first week back working at full clinic volume and without floorwalkers, and it seems to have gone pretty well. We have more to do to make sure every medication we prescribe is scanned, and every handover is from our computer. More work to do to book portering jobs on the system and to use Capman as intended. Optimisation, as we cover on the cover of Heartbeat, is a six month trip. But there is nothing to suggest we should stop or turn back – and when the hour changes in October the brief planned outage of Unity is just that, a planned outage that Cerner’s next upgrade will sort out UK-wide.
In November, we will do some engagement work around our future plans for grounds and gardens. One of the by-products of our smokefree work, has been a renewed pride in the outside space we own and use. Our frontline gardening teams have put forward some proposals for 2020 and 2021 across all our sites – I want everyone to have chance to comment on your environment. On first look we are taking the opportunity to concentrate planting into fewer more beautiful spaces, do our bit with more trees, as well as introducing community vegetable gardens on our sites, and some outdoor exercise equipment ready for spring next year. I know that the teams are doing to a great job cleaning up butts and debris, but let’s all play a part in tackling litter on our sites and using the huge number of bins we bought to make our place just a little bit smarter and more welcoming.
This month, the big push is now on for flu vaccination. Done mine – have you done yours? And the anonymous national staff survey. Have you done yours? I filled mine in on Monday! Remember you have to enter quickly to be in the prize drawer, and it really does take just a few minutes at home or work to fill it out online. The Chairman’s blog in Heartbeat writes about engagement and involvement, and our second wave of Pioneer applications are out now as we look to help teams to work well together and to influence how our organisation operates. The work of our City ED team on involvement and participation is a feature in Heartbeat this month.
Tonight, Des Coleman hosts our biggest ever Star Awards (#SWBHawards19). Thanks again to everyone who nominated someone. And well done to everyone nominated and shortlisted. There are lots of reasons to celebrate the successes of what we do every day. The awards are a chance to reflect on excellence without pretending that every day is without frustrations. The Trust is a successful place within our region’s NHS, and I think we should all take pride in what is being done – whether that is through new services like our FGM clinics, longstanding outstanding ones like our children and young people’s therapy service, or teams like complaints, second line or catering who keep our frontline service going. On Monday, our infection control and cleaning services face their annual inspection. Of course hygiene, cleanliness, and tackling infection is a job we all do. So good luck getting ready for the inspection and let’s make sure our standards stay high through the winter.
I suspect the Brexit bulletin may be out of date by the time you read it, but nonetheless, with a few weeks potentially to go, I would ask everyone to find a moment in coming days to consider your team’s readiness for those changes too.
#hellomynameisToby