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Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 17 March

March 17, 2023

Before I talk about the particular subject matter of the Midland Met development, I would like to say a few words about the planning and extraordinary effort put in by colleagues throughout the Trust, in response to the unprecedented strike action taken by non-consultant doctors this week. The strike action ran from 6.59am on Monday right through to 6.59am Thursday morning, a continuous 72-hour period. I think we learned or at least were reminded of a few things this week:

  • Just how fundamentally reliant we are on doctors in training to provide core service cover during “unsocial hours”. We should never underestimate their contribution to keeping our services afloat.
  • When one replaces less experienced doctors with more experienced ones, more definitive clinical decisions get made which benefit both the patients and the Trust. As an illustration, the last time we had so few patients awaiting admission in our emergency departments than on Tuesday morning, was Christmas Day seven years ago.
  • When national communication and media coverage about this action is low key, the general public’s awareness of it is limited and so urgent care demand was still at normal or close to normal levels, on Monday.
  • Our experience in the pandemic and over successive, increasingly difficult winters, has put our internal planning for such events onto a better footing. Likewise, our internal “critical incident” style command and control mechanisms and sharing of information.
  • The vast majority of our senior clinical staff, be they medical or other professions, stepped up massively and without complaint, covered duties and roles which took them way out of their comfort zone, yet kept going in exhausting and trying circumstances.

I have been humbled by your response to this, this week. Our debrief sessions and capture of learning has already begun and I am sure this will prove instructive and may lead to some changes to assumptions we have made around the Midland Met care models, for example. All of that will come later. For now, to all of you involved in planning for and/or covering duties during the strike action, a heartfelt thank you from me, on behalf of the Trust Board. I sincerely hope that we don’t have to do this again. If we do, it will prove an even bigger test of our willpower and planning, I suspect.

Throughout the week, most corporate meetings were stood down to free up colleagues to support patient care during the period of industrial action. I did make exceptions for a small number of core meetings for the MMUH programme recognising the importance of progressing with our plans to safely open the new hospital in 2024. Apart from some key clinicians, the MMUH Programme Company team came together on Monday as one of a series of quarterly away days. This focus for this session was on defining critical success factors. Attendees spent time in their workstreams exploring what success for the hospital programme would feel like for our Patients, People and Population. The importance of all of us being able to understand and clearly articulate the benefits of Midland Met cannot be underestimated. It is #morethanahospital and as well as patients being cared for in a fit for purpose environment we are expecting patient outcomes to be improved, staff and patient experience to be better and enhanced integration and flow between community and acute services.

These benefits all have a financial gain too. Through some excellent work with partners PwC we are able to put a monetary value against the benefits we expect. Even taking a cautious approach, the investment of building this new facility will be more than covered over the lifetime of the hospital when we account for patient safety improvements (e.g. IPC), energy and old estate costs, sale of the City site, not to mention the longer term regeneration opportunities. As PwC draw their work to a close, we will be able to share these benefits with you so that you can see just how valuable Midland Met is for our health and social care systems and the wider economy.

Today I took James Morris MP round the building and we were able to talk to him about these benefits. James has been a long-term supporter and advocate of the new hospital and is as eager as you and I to see it open. Although not directly in his constituency he recognises how significant the development is for local people and businesses, as well as the patients who will be cared for within it.