Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 14 June
June 14, 2019
Come to our Annual General Meeting on Thursday 20 June at 6pm to hear about the Trust’s achievements throughout the year, and from Dr Arvind Rajasekaran who is talking about clean air and respiratory medicine.
It was wonderful last weekend to hear that Elaine Newell’s longstanding, and significant, contribution to nursing and midwifery at the Trust, and to the care of babies and their families, had been recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list with the award of her OBE. Within our Trust we have so many people who go above and beyond – and our Star Award nominations are still open for a few more days – but Elaine stood out, not just in my own view, but in the eyes of many colleagues to whom I know she would pay tribute in light of this recognition.
Yesterday our finance team picked up an award at the HFMA ceremony – this was for their resilience. Resilience is, remarkably, precisely the leadership competency I talked about in our annual conference ten days ago, and I am delighted a team that has helped us to have strong financial discipline has been recognised. That discipline allows us to pay for things that matter to patients and to colleagues; investments like the new gym refurbishment at City, extra security lights by Postgrad, or the devices for Unity that will be arriving in droves come early August. Congratulations to Dinah and her team – and I know that the frustrations of Oracle are top of the list to tackle this summer!
Here and in Heartbeat you will have read a lot about our imaging transformation. New scanners are on en route to the BTC for early autumn. Last month; we managed our best ever turnaround times from referral to report. By August our MRI service will go genuinely seven day. And our Board has agreed a set of changes to bring artificial intelligence technologies into the department before the end of the year as well. One key turnaround time we are trying to all work together to change is for urgent and A&E related patients, and this week the “Rad Ready” standards were launched by John Morlese, our clinical director for the diagnostic imaging directorate. At the same time, there is some tremendous effort going on trust-wide to ensure we implement our results acknowledgement standard for all imaging reports issued after 1 April, as well as some historic reports. David Carruthers and I will be in touch shortly with clinicians who are leading the way, as well as meeting individually with a handful of colleagues who have not yet had chance to apply the new safety standard in their practice. Results acknowledgement omissions lie at the heart of at least half a dozen serious incidents in our care over the last three years. Unity gives us a much more user friendly set of arrangements from October, and we are working now to get our house in order before go-live.
The treatment of local residents impacted by the scandal over immigration policy last year continues to be a source of real concern. At the same time we are again supporting Windrush celebrations in our Trust and elsewhere in the local community. We have a huge amount to be grateful for in the contribution and sacrifice of a Caribbean origin community locally, and very many Black British colleagues working in our organisation. Donna Mighty and others have led work on the Here to Stay exhibition, which remains in our Education Centre, despite its many tours to venues like the Liverpool Slavery Museum, and its latest launch at Warwick University. We still have work to do – only this week I was asked to sign a complaint explaining – or perhaps explaining away – our inability to offer meals to patients that reflected the diversity of our local community: It is clear we have more to do. So Windrush investments in the Trust were not a one off, and a focus on diversity, in all that we do, including recruitment into our senior leadership, remains a focus for the Board.
I have almost finished this week’s message without mentioning our smokefree start date of Friday 5 July: three weeks away! I am sure you are ready. If you have do have questions or concerns do get in touch with me, with Ruth Wilkin, with David Carruthers or with Paula Gardner. It is hugely encouraging to hear of the dozens of colleagues who have quit smoking on the back of the changes, but we do need to be ready across the board to make the change. A consistent approach with patients and visitors will be essential to the effectiveness of our new arrangements.
I attach this week’s IT stats.