Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 15 March
March 15, 2024
Over the past few weeks, we have been progressing with the final elements of build for our new hospital, The Midland Met (MMUH). I was delighted to see that signage going up at Midland Met both on the outside and inside of the building, which shows that we are on the home straight now to open later this year.
As we move with pace towards opening there have been many interactive workshops and away days to support the move planning. During the month, our colleagues met to hold a workshop to discuss and action an interim solution for the Urgent Treatment Centre at MMUH on patient day one. This is essential to creating the right support to ensure that we fit safely in the new hospital and our patients are provided with the right alternatives at the front door when they need care from us.
We also held a Critical Providers workshop where other organisations from across the system met with colleagues from the MMUH Programme to ensure that they are ready to support the opening of our new hospital without causing delay to opening or impact on quality of care. I heard that it was a productive and enthusiastic and showed the great support that we have from those working with us across the system to ensure a safe, efficient and timely move. Others are nearly as excited about this as we are!
In February, the MMUH Programme Company also held one of the monthly ‘ Away Days’ which focussed, with our Clinical Services Teams, on delivering success and operational readiness. Teams focussed on bed fit, patient pathways and service interdependencies and recruitment. It was well attended, and the day was lively and informative as well as really interactive with great contributions and energy from our brilliant clinical and operational leadership teams.
In addition, I was delighted to attend a recent engagement event with our local GPs in Ladywood and Perry Barr . As with all engagement sessions, I hope that they will be open and honest whilst remaining a safe space to have candid conversations. This event was just that , a productive and challenging debate and most importantly whilst MMUH was the backdrop, discussions were focused about what is best for our patients, people and population. Thank you to those who have organised recent events and those that attended.
We are now moving closer to what we call “soft activation” on our Ready, Set , Go trajectory for MMUH and this feels like an important and exciting milestone – more on that in the next few weeks.
Today Lord Markham and members of the New Hospital Programme (NHP) along with exec leads from Balfour Beatty met with MMUH Managing Director, Rachel Barlow for a tour of progress on site. The minister who also visited just before Christmas , met colleagues Ian Oliver, Steve Hill and Michaeal Jequier, who are all heavily involved in the activation part of the programme in areas of logistics, soft FM, and security.
Lord Markham is Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care and Lead Minister with responsibility for the NHP.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to date, it certainly is all hands-on deck now.