Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 16 November
November 16, 2018
Clearly there are momentous events going on across our country. The Trust will submit our self-assessment of procurement and services risk from a No Deal Brexit in ten days’ time. And as you know, a fortnight ago the Board agreed to signal our support for worried colleagues by confirming that we would fund settlement and pre-settlement fee applications, including the costs of domiciled children for EU-origin employees. At the same time, we continue to work with HM Treasury to secure the necessary final consents to commence procurement for our completion contractor for Midland Met. Last week I included photographs of the site now, with Balfour Beatty back building and our Winter Garden structure taking shape.
I want to thank everyone who has worked so very hard over the last few days to stabilise our inpatient acute services. I know it is frustrating when we have empty beds in our community and intermediate care wards and are not organised sufficiently to use those resources (we can discharge safely at weekends!). In the last couple of days I have seen some terrific work by trainee doctors, nurses, consultants and pharmacists to achieve our first goal – 10 inpatient discharges each day from each site by 10am. That simple step means the daytime patient arrivals in our emergency departments are admitted, and our afternoon’s admissions can come in to. Night-time patient admissions are then for night-time arrivals at ED. To make this happen does mean change from various departments (big thanks to our transport team) and many individuals, but Lyndon 4, Lyndon 5 and Priory 5 have shown the way. Be under no doubt, we can safely do this, and owe it to patients waiting, ambulances queuing and staff working above and beyond in ED, to make it happen.
We are beginning to make progress with our IT. The next Unity dress rehearsal will take place in February. Before then, we need to get our training finished. So please book in if you have not yet been trained. I do appreciate that a few days stability, and a backlog of a 1,000 IT queries, is not where we want to be, but it is a tribute to continued energy and dedication in our IT team that we are seeing fewer avoidable interruptions to service. I know from feedback, not just from Ed Fogden, but from many, many colleagues, that our printer issues continue to be an iceberg of difficulty. And one directly connected of course in some cases to discharge. So during December, we will have in place a dedicated team focused solely on printer issues. We will work through the logged printer incidents, tour the sites looking for more printer issues, and I would encourage you to speak up and log any printer problems you face. I cannot promise how long it will take to fix that list, because I think it is a long, long list. But we are clear that we cannot make Unity work without a very coherent and stable printer infrastructure. So speak up, and Martin Sadler’s Christmas Printer Force will find you.
Attached are this week’s IT statistics: IT Performance Stats 16 November 2018
Next week we go live with our Quality Improvement Half Day Poster contest. Do get involved with this terrific project, which is one step in our work to spread learning, knowledge and improvement across our services. On 6 December we will announce the winners. The following day our weconnect survey closes. This is the replacement for our Your Voice model. This week I led a workshop with the first wave directorates taking part in that programme. weconnect is a Board-led programme which aims to spread our existing best practice in employee engagement across our organisation – driving up satisfaction (65 per cent) and addressing dissatisfaction (12 per cent). If you think those stats are not reflective of your view, well, there’s an easy answer: Fill in weconnect or answer the national staff survey for the NHS which is also out with a sample of staff right now.
I hope you want to be part of a Trust which puts patient care first. That means we need to maximise the extra care that our volunteering programme is helping us to achieve. We have now over 500 volunteers available to work across our Trust (up fourfold from two years ago). It means we need to create time to care for skilled clinicians from all disciplines. We have invested in projects like our ward Consultants of the Week to offer the leadership, mentoring and time that we need. And we need to make sure that great communication happens in our teams, bringing people together routinely, and ensuring we use a common language. To return to discharge, we will not make weekend discharges work, unless our criteria for discharge are clearly written and make sense to incoming teams. Finally, we need to unite to deliver big goals like our sepsis project. Over the last three weeks we have improved to 1 in 3 the number of screenings taking place for patients indicated as in need – up from 1 in 11 when the work started at the beginning of November. This is not a tick box exercise. It is part of the work, led by David Carruthers and Paula Gardner, to save at least 50 lives in 2019, when compared to 2017. Avoidable deaths from infection, which are part of our mortality challenge. We can do better. D15 and D16 are leading the way, and hit 100 per cent screening!
Yesterday our place in the top 50 most inclusive employers in the country was confirmed: We are ninth. A top ten finish this year, which is remarkable, but more to do to make working here a family friendly and flexible choice, disabled colleagues feel supported and enabled, and everyone to feel able to be themselves at work regardless of their sexual orientation. Many congratulations to Donna Mighty, Chris Rickards, Richard Burnell and especially Stuart Young, who have done so much to make this a reality of our values. Something to be very proud of.
Buy your tickets now for our Christmas Charity Ball, booking details on the following link:
Your Trust Charity – 80s Charity Ball
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