Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 14 February
February 14, 2020
Earlier today I announced the Board has decided to name our newest site as the Midland Metropolitan University Hospital. After contract signature last December, we joined community and academic partners in Grove Lane to commemorate the re-build work starting again in earnest this month. There is no change to opening plans for 2022. But from next month you can visualise the new hospital, inside as well as out, on our virtual reality headsets. Doing that conveys a sense of the scale and adjacencies we have coming. The next few months will see us intensify work to begin to plan seven day acute services with a therapeutic model focused on mobilisation and wellbeing. As I mentioned in the film we released internally this morning, crucially the university hospital has a place for you. By that I mean in particular that we have worked hard to create and preserve a design with space for colleagues to learn, to walk, and to talk.
When the Board next meets in March, the focus for much of our time will be on education. We are reviewing the detail of how the new Aston Medical School will integrate into the Trust this autumn, and how that will fit with our commitment to Birmingham. There will be time too to think about our pathways from band 2 to band 7 nursing roles, as nursing associates become part of our Trust in greater numbers. We have not finalised budgets for 2020-2021 as yet but I can be certain that our training spend will be ring-fenced and protected. PDRs are upcoming in the spring and that is absolutely the place to make sure that your needs are heard and that we do our very best to act on them.
Some people reading this message will have just had, or be about to get, a note about mandatory training. Most people who work for the Trust are 100% compliant with the national mandatory training obligations. Many of those obligations can be done online at work or home, and take minutes. Some of the training is necessarily face to face because the learning comes from interaction or simulation. There are now 7 weeks until the end of the public sector year. To move through pay gateways, to get excellence awards, to get a PDR score above good (2), you have to have completed by 31 March your mandatory training. I have finally got mine done. Please do yours.
Our latest Star of the Week is Jessica Arnold, Service Manager in the Mortuary Service who was nominated by Matron, Joanne Thomas after supporting the ward with a rapid release.
Thank you to everyone who contributes to our fundraising and charity work as a Trust. We gain greatly from the Your Trust charity. This week’s committee agreed funding for children’s sensory care. Each year we spend over half a million pounds on new projects. Our fund ambassadors do a fantastic job raising awareness of how to raise funds and putting forward projects for improvement. Next month we launch a major public appeal associated with research, the arts and other special additions that we want to make to the new hospital. There is loads of information on Connect and Heartbeat gives us all stories and inspiration from around our organisation about what others are doing to raise funds and participation.
I am pleased that this week we confirmed plans to put the ‘late shift’ car park into Sandwell, near maternity services and Trinity. In addition we agreed some expansion plans for coffee and catering outlets as we look to make working here just a little easier. I know that the damage to the Birmingham Treatment Centre this Monday has caused huge difficulty and reorganisation. I want to thank everyone who has worked to move patients into new clinics or theatres. Liam Kennedy is leading our response to this and we will certainly be working to get the building back to standard and recover the costs of what has happened.
In a few weeks’ time we will have our new PET scanner arriving, next to the BTC. That announcement, alongside confirmation that specialist gynaecological cancer services are staying with us for the long term, confirms that the Trust has a specialist and complex care future, entwined with our work to better integrate care in home and community settings. What better encouragement could there be to get more involved now in our research work. We have a new leadership team heading up that effort, in Derek Connolly and Gina Dutton. Now is our time to make plans for trials, and make sure that trial enrolment is a whole specialty endeavour.
Of course, alongside these expansions, we need to make the usual every year financial savings. This means difficult choices. From April there will be changes to approval routes for the use of agency contractors in all professions. With 300 people currently under offer to join us, now is the right time to again look to reduce below £10m a year the agency bill we face. Every corporate/back bone service now has a balanced financial plan for the next twelve months. One of those plans changes cleaning regimes in office and non-clinical areas. During March the management team for hotel services will outline what will change to make that transition work well. It should be said that this is us doing what many, many NHS and other organisations already do. Our commitment to maintaining, and if possible increasing, cleaning availability in clinical areas is unchanged.
In the next few weeks we will obtain, we trust, final planning consent for our new car parks. Particularly at Sandwell, the construction of the car parks, will reduce further the available spaces while we build. We will make some choices before year end about how best to manage that, but I want again to highlight that parking in our New Square facility is entirely free. It is a short walk from site, and anyone who wants to volunteer to adjust their pass can do so via Diane Alford. In mentioning that can I also underline that, whilst when I get a car parking ticket at work or outside work, I am sometimes annoyed, none of us are entitled to take our personal frustration out on others who are trying to administer systems like our car parking system. The staff-led appeals process is designed to work on all of our behalf, and neither escalating to me, nor expressing oneself in aggressive terms to junior colleagues, will make alter the outcome of that process. I want to thank the staff networks, trade unions, and other colleagues who act on those panels.
The latest weconnect quarterly survey is out and about. And our second wave Pioneer teams have started too. t is really encouraging to see the effort going into, and the results being delivered, from this engagement work. Wellbeing is part of that work. Before the summer we will sort out our approach to hydration (and plastics), and our pods for resting are going well. The big impact so far from a lot of our team-based engagement work is improvements in trust at local level. At the end of February we will also have finished our survey work on face to face communications and which teams are missing out on that. A year ago the Clinical Leadership Executive collectively committed to everywhere in the Trust would have monthly team meetings and face to face briefings. Notwithstanding shift patterns, busyness and so on – please speak up if you are missing out!
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