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Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 15 November

November 15, 2024

Dear colleagues,

Wow – what a week!

Midland Met has now been fully operational for five days and it feels great to have our clinical expertise under one (quite beautiful) roof. It’s a building which still takes the breath away, even when you go back, multiple times.

As we saw post the first move, I know there have been, and will be, teething problems, but please keep escalating them through the right routes and we will resolve them as quickly as possible.

We have seen fewer calls to both our Equans and IT helpdesks this week, which is positive, and we have seen an improvement in colleagues being able to navigate the building. We know that the signage and general wayfinding still isn’t where we want it to be, and in response, Rachel Barlow is leading a working group to develop and improve this quickly. Please do keep telling us what will help make things better for you, our patients, and our visitors.

Remember – there is a useful section on Connect if you are unsure of who you need to speak to regarding an issue.

To contact Equans call 0121 507 4444 or email your request to  SWBH-Helpdesk.uk@equans.com.

To contact IT call 0121 507 4050 or chat with the IT Service Desk.

We are currently in the process of documenting some lessons learned about the move and identifying things that we have done as part of the move, that we now want to see how we could incorporate into our business as usual. One example of this is the patient census. This ran during the week leading up to the move and was significant in driving increased patient discharges home and transfers into community-based locations. Our teams are now looking at how we could use this principle to support our patient flow moving forwards.  Our urgent care safety and experience has, numerically at least, marginally improved since our move, so lets keep improving that work every day.

If there are things that you have found worked well for you during the planning and move process, I would encourage you to talk to your leadership team about how you can embed them into your future working practices.

Wednesday saw our latest Trust Board meeting take place, which was in fact my last Board as Chief Executive of this remarkable organisation. If you missed my announcement earlier this week, I have made the difficult decision to step down at the end of December 2024. I have been incredibly proud to be at the helm for the last four years, but now we are in a new hospital, it is the right time for me to step aside and for another chief executive to bring fresh ideas to delivering our post-MMUH world, including:

  • Embedding a quality improvement system that works for all and improves our “standard work”
  • Improving our delivery against NHS waiting time standards in urgent and elective care
  • Investing further in team and individual leadership and management development
  • Defining what we mean by “community first” and driving further improvements in population health locally
  • Delivering on the “Fundamentals of Care”
  • Commencing further, strategic estates reconfiguration to improve our environment in all our healthcare locations

You can listen to more about my reasons for this decision by watching the video below.

The Board heard from our Elderly Care Service, who talked about their experience of the team effectiveness and leadership development interventions that they have been undergoing to support their transition to Midland Met.

The purpose of this intervention, which has been undertaken by a number of teams, is to ensure safe patient care, whilst also strengthening team dynamics and supporting staff wellbeing.

The move to MMUH has seen the Elderly Care team transition from five wards into four and merge different leadership styles. The team reported that the OD programme has enabled them to reset the culture of the team in a new environment and optimise clinical productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency.

This work will continue, with more teams benefiting from the work of our OD team.

Community-first is crucial to the Midland Met care model, and I am delighted to welcome our new Interim Chief Development Officer, Sian Thomas into the organisation. Sian joined us from The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, where she has been integral to developing their community pathways and out of hospital care. She has also played a pivotal role in the work of their place-based partnership. I think there will be some exciting developments in our community services and pathways in the forthcoming months.

Finally, we are now only two weeks away from close of the staff survey and yesterday, we are only sitting at a response rate of 25% – if you are yet to complete your survey, please ensure it becomes a priority over the next few days. The survey is sent to you via email and will come from Picker – you can simply search ‘Staff Survey 2024’ in your inbox and follow the link. It is really important that we hear the views of a wide range of colleagues, particularly at a time when the organisation is going through so much exciting change.

Thank you.

Have a good weekend.

Richard