Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 15 March
March 15, 2019
This week saw more great news in our recruitment efforts. Our ground-breaking Health Overseas Professionals (HOP) project working with refugee and migrant clinicians was nominated for a national award. At the same time, we attended the RCNi jobs fair in Birmingham and made 47 conditional job offers, to go alongside the 174 conditional job offers made on our Australian nursing recruitment tour. We believe we have recruited a team of new ear, nose and throat specialists to join us in the spring, and more ophthalmologists too, with next week seeing interviews in emergency medicine and radiology.
From April, the Trust’s Board begins monitoring all teams against our maximum 2 per cent vacancy target, as we look to make 2019 the year in which we end any sense that we are either deliberately or passively accepting absences from our funded safe staffing levels. Of course, it is easy to state the aim, to be fully staffed, and hard to do, but we have a good case to make for why working in our organisation is a great mission to join and a supportive, enabling, educational employment opportunity. That is precisely the conversation with school nurses, who join us soon, and the GP partnerships that we take on in the weeks ahead. But, and maybe here’s my key point, we cannot approach that aim that the Board has set without addressing retention in some areas of the Trust. That means a focus on PDRs as a development conversation about both meeting someone’s wants in this job and matching their ambitions for their career beyond that job. By now your PDR should be booked for April, May or June. We have agreed to grow our training budget by 40 per cent: So get your plans together.
I wrote last week about progress at Midland Met. The cranes are gradually coming down to be replaced by the fabulous Winter Garden. I am hopeful that by this summer we will know not only who will finish the job but have a final contract in place to continue the work that Balfour Beatty have been undertaking. Yet, in a perhaps less high profile way, we continue to invest big sums in our existing estate. Some of that is the extra £15m we were granted to maintain the estate with the delay on the new hospital. But some of it is spending for the long term. So we have our new colposcopy unit at Sandwell, alongside the Trust’s main clinical research facility. By the summer we will have our fracture clinic moved into the BTC, and progress work to relocate oral surgery there too. And we are completing the work to locate corporate functions on our Sandwell site with the move of the governance and risk teams from the DGM building at City into the current Elizabeth suite. The final ‘configuration’ of Trust services and teams is taking shape and we will publish in April details of the countdown of moves to 2022. That will include of course the investment to refurbish our neonatal unit, and in all probability some changes too in paediatrics and respiratory medicine. Now is very much the time for us to be migrating to the clinical models and the team relationships that we will have on a single acute site. When the CQC report from last year is published, it will be clear that, for all the progress we make, there remain issues with our emergency pathways for both adults and children. Yet we should be pleased to enter the 90s this week for sepsis screening, a transformation from the 20s of the last summer.
Today saw our latest QIHD. I hope you had a good one, and that your accreditation submission is in. The shared learning topic was, of course, the countdown towards our smoke free sites. This week was National No Smoking Day and I notice that the government confirmed on that day funding for in-hospital quit support. That is yet another example of where we take a lead, others are following. In the next ten days we launch our Period Poverty project, which from this summer will be NHS wide. Our push for vaping and for nicotine replacement as a pathway to better health and wealth by quitting is clearly one of the big projects of coming months. If you do smoke, please get ready for July 5 by thinking about how we can help you to stop smoking. Our sites are simply full of cameras, and we will be using those, retrospectively, and our enforcement wardens, live time, to ensure that visitors, patients and our colleagues are not smoking anywhere on our sites, indoors or outdoors, in cars or huddled outside the buildings in which we provide healthcare. Our midwives have led the way with their work to tackle smoking in pregnancy, and we want to take that spirit into our Trust-wide campaign to Make Every Contact Count.
The next big milestone in our improvement work is the new contract for imaging. I have written a few times about the changes that happen in April, and Heartbeat will tell you more later this month. We will have a guaranteed 24 hour turnaround for inpatient modalities to get a report back, with obviously faster turnaround for urgent results. For all other referrals, from GPs or in outpatients, the maximum wait will be five days. This is a quiet revolution from where we are now, and will put absolutely at the forefront of service in the NHS in the West Midlands. If we ally that change to the investments we started in 2016 through our managed equipment service with Siemens, we are determined to make sure that diagnostic quality is a hallmark of being treated here or working here. Our IT team are working hard to make sure that PACs is reliable, and I know how determined our breast screening team is to drive up coverage in our population, and respond to surges in demand associated with public health campaigns around breast cancer. During May and June we will be starting a concerted campaign to make sure that reported results, be they in imaging or pathology, are formally acknowledged by requesting clinical teams, so that we are more certain than today that no abnormal conclusions are missed. David Carruthers has written to individual clinicians about responsibilities and expectations in this area, and myself and others have spent time reviewing how this will be enabled by Unity when that goes live. We have worked hard this year to cut waits for diagnostic tests, the new contract means transformed reporting, and we want to ‘close the loop’ with results acknowledgement. That cycle is one that has the potential to drive better outcomes, and to make working in our Trust feel a little safer too. My thanks to Sarah Yusuf and her team in particular for the work being done to make that happen.
SWB Brexit Bulletin 15th March 2019
Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 15 March 2019
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