Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 15 April
April 15, 2022
Dinah McLannahan, Chief Finance Officer
Richard Beeken is away
As we head into the Bank Holiday weekend, I know many of us are feeling anxious about our capacity to continue providing safe patient care in the midst of the urgent and emergency care pressures that we are experiencing. As Richard said last week, the front door challenges affect all of us and we all have a contribution to make in supporting patient care and those colleagues who are most stretched. Thank you to everyone who is continuing to work really hard to put together a weekend plan that ensures safe patient care. What our teams do day and night is truly remarkable and your efforts are greatly appreciated.
I wanted to take this opportunity to remind us all, in the wake of the Ockenden report but also generally, of the importance of speaking up. I am really privileged to have recently taken on the executive lead role for speaking up. One of the key learnings in the Independent review of the maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford was to ensure a safe and supportive environment for people at all levels to speak up if they see a safety concern, listening carefully and acting on concerns raised.
I see my key role as executive lead being oversight of the speak up function in the Trust, supporting our speak up lead and freedom to speak up guardians in their roles, ensuring speak up is properly resourced, has the capacity and capability to triangulate information, ensuring there is a regular voice heard at the Board meetings, and above all, holding myself and my executive and non-executive colleagues to account for our behaviour in relation to speak up and of our teams and how we handle matters of concern raised to us. It is this that will ensure we have the right organisational culture towards speaking up in our Trust.
We took a paper to Public Board in April that sets out our 30, 60 and 100 day actions. This action plan was agreed by the Board and we are getting on with implementing it. We have a new Speak Up lead in the Trust, Emma Barton, who is starting with us this month working full time on Freedom to Speak Up – she has agreed the action plan also, and going forward she will be providing regular updates directly to Board. I have also met with most of the Freedom to Speak up Guardians for an initial conversation about where we are with freedom to speak up in the Trust at the moment from their point of view. I also meet regularly with Lesley Writtle, our Trust Vice-Chair and Non-executive lead for freedom to speak up in our Trust.
Creating an open, safe and constructive environment for speaking up is so important to me. Our job is to provide high quality patient care. We achieve that, I think, by having a psychologically safe culture with happy, productive and engaged colleagues. That isn’t possible without having the right approach to being able to speak up when things are not right. It is fundamental to everything we do. I have practised this philosophy in my team since I joined the Trust, I regularly reinforce to my team the importance of speaking up if something is bothering them, and if we can do something about it, we do.
If I had one key message, it is to please speak up if you have a concern at work. Ideally this should be to your line manager, but if that isn’t possible there are many ways in which you can raise a concern including our Freedom to Speak Up Guardians, Trade Union colleagues and Trust specialists including counter fraud, HR and our health and safety teams. Alternatively, you can contact me at dinah.mclannahan@nhs.net or on 07816 535761. Together we can create a safe culture where speaking is welcomed by all, and helps improve our care to our patients, their families and each other.
As always thank you for everything you do for our patients and for each other. If you have some time off over Easter I do hope you enjoy it, and if you are working, thank you.