Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 13 December
December 13, 2019
It’s been a big week at the Trust. Remarkable and heroic efforts have been made night and day to ensure that we can safely look after children and adults arriving in need of emergency assessment and admission. The age and frailty of the patients coming to us continues to increase which is one of the reasons that it is so positive that we have quality improvement projects in frailty winning awards. In truth, however, our low and slow discharge volume continues to be the reason that we have to open unplanned beds or support patients in cubicles for eight, nine or 10 hours. A retraining and support process for the use of the CapMan product together with targeted assistance to individual clinical teams around discharge excellence are both taking place over the coming four weeks. It is clear that we do not have a shared understanding of the risk threshold for discharge when considered against the risks associated with delayed admission.
Last week we celebrated our QIHD poster award winners and this time next week we will celebrate our Christmas decoration stars. But for me the greatest pleasure of this week has been listening to our first wave weConnect pioneer teams present their successes and their ambitions for the future. You will remember that these are teams who volunteered to try to improve trust, communication, fairness and engagement where they work. It was clear from the presentations how much progress has been made in every single team. But two of our teams now have engagement outcomes that are in the top quintile. In simple terms we have two teams with engagement scores of more than 4.0 out of 5.0. They are pictured at the top of this message. Both of these teams shared a challenge of being spread across multi locations and multi disciplines where employees and their team managers may not be able to spend face to face time together very often. Both of these teams have in common that staff sometimes feel undervalued by the organisation as a whole or misunderstood so it is a special success to have seen them progress so far in 2019 and to be so determined to carry on their success in 2020.
I explained to the pioneer teams, and of course more are applying now to be in our 2nd wave, that in 2020 in addition to building our next organisation strategy we will be doing Trust-wide work in our values and behaviours ensuring that they remain relevant to our vision but also real for everyone working within the organisation. I will be asking our pioneer teams to pay a particular role in developing our values and behaviours work because it’s really important that that work comes from you rather than from the board or our directors.
On Wednesday you may be aware that we signed the construction contract to complete the Midland Metropolitan by 2022. We are delighted that Balfour Beatty share our commitment to apprenticeships for learning and have also committed to a smokefree site like all our other Trust sites. Work on the clinical model and the changes to practice that we want to see in the Midland Met will kick off in March and April and May of 2020. That work will build on all of your thinking as we look to ensure that we create a genuine seven day acute centre that can support our home-based care, outpatient care and community-based beds. The big change with Midland Met is not the environment, although the clinical adjacencies will be fiercely helpful, but the mind-set that we need in the hospital to deliver the very best outcomes for our population in all its diversity and bearing in mind the continually aging demography of our communities.
Good luck to everyone involved in the big neonatal move next week. The more spacious environment and its decent storage should create a better working environment for our teams. We are determined to both recruit and retain in our neonatal services and the new build is just the start of that exciting project.
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