Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 12 January

January 12, 2024

As we look to our future, beyond the opening of MMUH, we start to set the foundations for our next significant development opportunity, as a Trust and System Partner, to sustainably improve the care we provide to our people, patients, and population.

Our current poor staff survey response rates, the findings of our Fundamentals Of Care programme and our extremely challenging financial position highlight the amount of work we need to do, together, to achieve the standards we aspire to.

In 2023 the Trust’s 2022-27 strategy identified continuous quality improvement as an enabler to the delivery of our vision and objectives. This was because we recognised, by researching very successful healthcare organisations, that by creating the right conditions for continuous improvement we would be able to respond more effectively to today’s challenges, deliver better care for patients and give better outcomes for communities. We learnt that continuous improvement is the single biggest staff empowerment and quality improvement vehicle we could deploy.  We also decided that carrying on as we were, would not change things sufficiently.  In other words, if you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always got.

In 2023 NHS England launched NHS IMPACT (Improving Patient Care Together), which is a guidance for all NHS Organisations to follow, to encourage the implementation of a continuous improvement approach. This was assuring as it confirmed to us that our commitment to continuous improvement was the right approach for us to take.

So, what is continuous improvement and what will it looks like at SWBH? Put simply, it’s an approach, from floor to Board which will empower and upskill all our staff, executives included, to not only come to work to do their work but to come to work to improve their work every day. It will result in us all working together on fewer priorities, but to a greater depth to make more significant improvements to our measures of success. It is not another improvement initiative that will come and go. It is not a programme to teach improvement tools and run a number of improvement projects. It will become “the way we will do things round here.” This will take time and commitment from us all. As a Board and as an executive team, I can assure you we are committed to this for the long term.

I am pleased to update you that we have now moved another step closer to our ambition to launch and embed our own SWB approach to continuous improvement. We have begun our work with our expert external partner who will teach us how to become a continuous improvement organisation over the next two years. We will then be sufficiently skilled and prepared to continue the journey on our own. The first step has been a readiness assessment by the executive team to enable us to hold a mirror up to how we function as an organisation at present, so that we can start to plan our approach to improving that. We have also begun to define what the areas of focus will be for improvement for 2024/25. These will be shared with you as part our 24/25 annual plan.

Over the next 6-9 months, as we are preparing and moving in to MMUH, work will be going on in the background to launch our continuous improvement approach post MMUH move. During this time, you will have the opportunity to learn more about continuous improvement as part of the ARC leadership training programme (module three).

If you would like to learn more about NHS IMPACT in the meantime, you can join the NHS IMPACT Sharing Event on 1 February at 9:30am – 11am. This virtual event is for anyone who’s curious about improvement and is open to all NHS staff, regardless of your role.

Register for the sharing event here.

Another important way that we can see how things are with in the organisation, is via the results of the staff survey. You will know that I was disappointed in the response rate to the annual survey which took place during October/November – so I am really pleased to see that we have already improved on the responses to the quarterly Pulse survey, which is currently open and will close on 31 January. The higher the response rate, the more reliable the data that we get and the better informed we can be to make improvements.

If you have not yet taken the survey, please do take five minutes (I promise it won’t take longer) to have your say: Questionnaire Portal (quality-health.co.uk)

Have a good week.

Richard.