Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 17 January
January 17, 2020
For a while now, we have wanted to up the ante in publicly celebrating individuals as well as teams who go the extra mile. Shout Outs have been a big success in Heartbeat and on Connect. Star of the Week is another part of that intention. Ruth Wilkin, our director of communications, was at Rowley Regis to present the first Star of the Week Award of 2020 to Caroline Ndachangedzwa, Staff Nurse on Eliza Tinsley ward. If you want to nominate someone as a Star of the Week employee, fill out that form on Connect https://connect2.swbh.nhs.uk/communications/star-of-the-week/. It takes moments.
Caroline had no idea she had been nominated and told us that she was over the moon. She was nominated by a colleague, Healthcare Assistant, Neil Smallman, who had seen the compassionate way she looked after a patient who was at end of life and their family when the patient died at Leasowes. Caroline was doing a bank shift at the time and explained how she stayed with the daughter to allow her to grieve with her father and make sure she was in a fit state to drive home. She also asked the daughter to contact her so she was sure she had returned safely. Caroline was amazed to be nominated and was quick to praise her ward leaders who she said were first class role models and supported her every step of the way.
This week Healthwatch published an important, and fairly critical, national report into how complaints are handled in the NHS and used to improve standards of care. Sir Robert Francis, who you will remember led the Mid-Staffs enquiry, chairs the national Healthwatch body https://www.healthwatch.co.uk/report/2020-01-15/shifting-mindset-closer-look-complaints
Our Trust was rated in the top 15% in the country for the transparency with which we manage and report on complaints. And commended for the information in our annual report and board papers on how complaints drive learning. For our next public annual report in June we will, as I have mentioned here before, be highlighting 100 changes made in our organisation in the last 18 months as a direct result of patient feedback. Look out for details of that in next week’s TeamTalk briefing, and there is still time for you to submit your examples! Congratulations to the team centrally involved in our complaint handling, but also to the very many local leaders who investigate, draft responses to, and act on, the complaints that we get. Every single one, through Purple Point, written complaints, or one to one comment, is a chance to see our work through someone else’s eyes, think about the impact of what we do, and consider how we adjust and shape our care to their needs.
You may have seen publicity recently about potential changes to national NHS constitution standards, including the headline “four hour” standard. The arrangements for tracking these things nationally are a matter for others, but I thought it important to be very explicit that as a Trust we will continue to collect data on and manage against the current standard, alongside any new ones introduced. Many of us worked in the service in the 1990s and before, and none of us wish to return to a model where it is possible for very long waits in emergency settings to go ‘below the radar’. The wait time of people queuing for admission is a clinical safety standard and we know that the outcome for patients who wait some time can be worse. I want to thank everyone who works hard, each night and through the day, to balance the risk of delay with the challenges of safe discharge. Over the last few years we have reduced high levels of unplanned readmissions into our Trust, such that we are broadly in line with published norms. Our quality plan has an ambition to reduce by a further 1,000 the number of people each year who are readmitted unexpectedly into our care. That is because our quality plans are ambitious about delivering standards better than the norm, typically reaching the best 25% in the NHS. You know this is all about Good and Outstanding care.
The National Audit Office published this week their latest enquiry into the collapse of Carillion in 2018. A number of media outlets carried the report, which looks at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, our own Midland Met, and the national and local response to the crisis. It must be right that we explore why this collapse happened, how we have all responded, and what we should do differently. I am pleased that the report makes no new recommendations for local action, and emphasises the diligence and determination with which our teams have worked to secure Balfour Beatty and Engie to deliver our acute centre in 2022. More and more colleagues in the Trust are visiting the site, especially the community room which overlooks the building. We want to give everyone chance to do that if we can. Before Easter we will also have available on each of our sites Virtual Reality ‘headsets’ which allow you to walk around Midland Met under your own direction and get a sense of the scale, colour and lay out of the building many people across our local system will be working in. More details to follow on that, but worth really emphasising the excitement and opportunity that the new build creates.
Last week I announced the plans from April to merge our Trust with the work of the primary care Your Health Partnership group within Sandwell. This and other changes will see around one in ten local people registered for general practice with this Trust: A big change for us from five years ago. This week we continued to work through the Integrated Care Partnership arrangements that we have in place in both Sandwell and in Ladywood/Perry Barr with formal governance arrangements being signed off. In 2020-2021 it will be increasingly important to us to work collaboratively in each “place” to try and deliver the best outcomes that we can. Initially our focus is on the impact of obesity on children and adults, on school readiness, and on end of life care.
These machinations can seem distant or irrelevant to the work many people in the Trust do. But I would hope over time, as we get practical and make real improvements, it will be easier to relate your work to that of colleagues in primary care, in social care or in the voluntary sector. Our partnering skills have brought us collaborations with Aston University, IBM Watson, Agewell, Urban Health, Kissing It Better, Walsall Manor, radiologists in Australia and the Netherlands, private companies and community gardening groups – to name just a selection. I can only see opportunity for us in the common purpose we share in each locality and I know that your ideas will be important in that.
In 2018 we used TeamTalk to ask people across the organisation what you felt was most important about joint work with GPs. Medication reviews came back at the number one answer from many of you. I am delighted that medication reviews are indeed one of the priorities for both partnerships as we look to ensure that every one has the right medication, but only the necessary medication across boundaries of care and between clinicians. Your views and voice are driving those priorities.
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