Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 15 February

February 15, 2019

We have grit but so far no snow and let’s hope it stays that way. We do continue to see the impact of flu on our admissions, and I can only reiterate the absolute importance of being up to date with vaccinations. Meanwhile, the Full Dress Rehearsal for Unity continues. The first two weeks have taught us a lot, with most of those who have used the system reporting really positively. I was delighted to hear at the Digital Committee today from our lead clinicians, two bits of feedback in particular:

That having a ‘hard stop’ on VTE assessment was disruptive. That is great news because it is meant to be. VTE assessment is a key safety intervention and one that can save lives, so we make no apology for using our technology to make conducting the assessment and putting it onto the system so it is visible to all clinicians looking after a patient an absolute priority.
That moving to the new Electronic Prescribing illustrated the real weaknesses of our current drug charts, especially around legibility. Again, that is the point of the change – the gain which makes the pain worthwhile. Our insight into medication errors in our care remains partial, but we are confident that the move to the new system will improve quality and prevent mistakes.

On the run up to the new N3 connection in April, our IT technical team have a huge volume of work to do to improve our infrastructure. That work will then get us ready for Unity Go Live. In January we had 8 of our 13 critical gold systems work all day every day, and no network downtime. But specific systems, including PACs had several hours of downtime, and many more hours of slow time. A precursor to Go Live is resolving just that.

You will know that now no IT incident logged with our Helpdesk is closed without your agreement as the reporter, or customer even. Over 3,000 of you had closed tickets in January, where you agreed the team had fixed your issue. Well done! Fixing the Wifi and our printers will close many more tickets, but the biggest gain is changing our password policy which is going live over coming weeks.

Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 15 February 2019

Unity is a quality improvement project with a digital base. That means we all need to know how to use it best. If you are one of the 326 untrained people in our Trust on the system, please step forward. Over coming weeks there will be access to both the play domain and the e-learning system to help those who are already trained to stay expert or gain confidence in the system.

The other big news from the last week, I think, was the subject I wrote to everyone about: our success in winning back the Sandwell school nursing contract from April. That is exciting because many of those staff are old friends of local teams in our midst, but also because it creates a platform, working with schools and teachers, and parents, including parents on our staff, to tackle health issues in our midst. Fizz Free February has had publicity this month. Next month we go live with our period poverty project, FreeFlow, Trust-wide, and of course that is an issue for young people in the borough too, which is why the Red Box project is prevalent in some places. Whether it is educating children on headaches, or addressing issues of bullying and exclusion, we want to use the new opportunity to help and contribute to the big health challenges we face. Of course that agenda is not confined to young people. I had the privilege to meet this week with 50 voluntary sector leaders in Lozells and listen to their ambitions for how services can develop to tackle inequality and exclusion. Our Care Alliance work to integrate care will be precisely that grassroots endeavour. Local GPs will get central funding to support social prescribing, and we will work with partners to try and target services better at the most vulnerable residents in our communities.

We know that employment matters very much to health. You may have seen some publicity for our longstanding Health Overseas Professionals project (HOP) in the Guardian newspaper and online. This project is about building bridges, not building walls, and about tackling the NHS workforce crisis by looking at the talent in our midst. This project looks especially at clinicians and professionals from overseas, here as refugees or migrants, and by supporting education and qualification conversion, creates for us a pipeline of knowledgeable people who can join our teams, or those in local primary care. Our educational role is important to many people working in the Trust, and whether it is new systems like HOP, or our longstanding traditions around nursing or medical education we want to make sure that the student experience with us is effective and exciting.

I am delighted to be able to end this message by confirming a 40% increase in next year’s training budget across the Trust. Needs analysis work is going on through each clinical group, and we want to ensure that the bigger pot is used fairly across all professions. We are one Trust and one team, and we want to develop individuals and teams to succeed. So please do not be told, we have no funds, because we are committed to prioritising education and linking that investment to individual PDRs and to an obligation to share your learning with your peers. In other words, there is more money to fund training, but we will be asking you to join the welearn revolution here and share what you know and what you learn with others.

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