Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 19 April

April 19, 2019

Best wishes for Good Friday and for the whole Easter period and a huge thank you to everyone working in our community teams and in each hospital this long weekend. This is often a testing time in the midst of half terms, and of course right now we are still battling at Sandwell, our community infection outbreaks. So it is good to have everyone pulling together with some terrific examples of resilience, effort and ingenuity. I mentioned a few individuals last week and I wanted to pay tribute this week to Julie Booth and Tranprit Saluja. The infection control service is helping us to think about new ways to manage risk, and I look forward to their upcoming presentation to the Trust Board. As we look at everything with one eye on the Midland Met model, I know that leaders like Paula Gardner want us to move onto the new site with the best and most modern practices. That written, there is no substitute for our ‘OK to ask’ approach to handwashing and cross infection, so let’s make sure all of us feel able to ask of visitors, patients and all employees whether someone is complying with our policies. We do need to be constantly vigilant, and some people will be aware of a recent spread of TB from patient to employee in our Trust. Given that, let me issue “an Easter plea” for a focus on single use masks – wear them once and only once. Let’s keep isolation doors closed. Of course this relies on using side rooms with en suite to manage infection risk!

This week the Trust Board began examining, as we do every eighteen months or so, longer term risks to care and safety, and to the Trust itself. This is contained within our risk register of course, but also in a linked document called the Board Assurance Framework. It looks at issues like labour supply, not such much given Brexit, more given trends on workforce recruitment and numbers going into training. It looks too at how the NHS is developing and changing its funding models to create incentives for different things. And of course it looks at outcomes from care, not just like our mortality data, but also models of care like local care homes. When we built our 2020 Vision it was striking how important it was that we had a mind to the longer term. That remains our pitch as we work with GP partners in particular to create integrated care alliances in places and to collaborate with GPs, and their primary care networks. We are very close now to having a settled map of these PCNs which will bring some GP approaches into a more standardised form. A lot of our conversations with PCNs as a clinical leadership team are about population health. By that I mean analysing the needs of specific populations of maybe 30,000 people. We are looking particularly at who uses what services, who uses no services, and how we predict need and intervene earlier in someone’s care. Not everyone who arrives in A&E is a surprise, likewise maternity emergencies and those using community outreach teams. I don’t want the long term to become though the enemy of good ideas right now. So we are absolutely encouraging GPs to work with us on smaller scale JDI projects. If you too have ideas at the boundary of what we do and what our GP colleagues do, please get in touch with Donna Mighty or Dottie Tipton.

In six weeks’ time we will host the Trust’s annual Leadership Conference. Whilst our finances are strong, we are still going to do this at the Bethel Centre – as we bring together over 200 people to talk about 2019, 2020 and beyond. The focus this year, and also the focus for June’s Annual Report and Trust AGM (20 June – do come!) is on Learning. Unity provides a fantastic opportunity to create and share better data in our organisation. But key projects like our Schwartz Rounds are an opportunity to more reflective learning. In May the Clinical Leadership Executive will review every single serious incident from the year just ended, as we look to make sure that where there are preventable errors or lessons from one team to another, we find the best way to do that sharing. All of us will have different learning styles and preferences, and we want to ensure that our approach as a Trust, which we call welearn, caters for that diversity. We might be sharing knowledge on myConnect, in QIHD, through Heartbeat, or by sharing stories on video. With the big investment we are making in training, we will be looking to anyone funded to go to a major conference, from every profession, to make a commitment to share their learning with others inside the Trust. This mobilisation, allied to our Learning from Excellence project, modelled on the Children’s Hospital and elsewhere, is a couple of years work, which is why we are keen to get moving this summer, with our launch at the conference on 4 June.

Sooner than that, on 29 April in fact, we launch our 28-Day Unity Challenge. There has been loads of publicity around this, including its inclusion as our shared learning topic in yesterday’s QIHD. May is definitely the month when all of us need to get engaged and involved with Unity. Almost everyone has now had basic training. But the challenge is about making Unity real where you work. We have our Play System ready to use now, with prizes for the best use of the system during the challenge, and all sorts of other quizzes, tests and ideas. The calendar is out, and we are looking to see every team and department scratch off each day’s challenge. I am especially looking forward to visiting day on 15 May when many, many leaders will be out and about asking teams about Unity and understanding how far into the Trust the message and the learning has gone. We have 11 core competencies in place for every profession to master – with Making Every Contact Count a common thread. When we go live with Unity that emphasis on brief health advice will become a really central part of what we do across the Trust, as we move towards more social prescribing in the NHS, as well as traditional health promotion activities. Daily comms and Connect are the places to look for all your Unity updates. It really will pay dividends this summer to have put some time into spring preparedness.

You will undoubtedly see in your local paper this weekend, speculation over the future of our local Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). In July a decision is due to be taken about this. In my own view there is a link of sorts between this and a series of other issues, most vitally Midland Met. What we are campaigning to ensure is that the local population who live around our sites, and rely on Midland Met, are protected and supported. West Birmingham is one of the most deprived and excluded parts of the city. Both now, and under the Heart of Birmingham PCT, we saw funds intended for Ladywood and Perry Barr spent in Solihull and elsewhere. So we want to ensure transparency and integrity in any future proposal. That future proposal is not yet written, and when it is I hope that it is clear what the benefits of change are, and we ensure coordinated services, including joining up to what we do in Midland Met. Anyone seeing echoes of referendums where options are unclear and votes are taken without certainty of options would not be too far wrong. It is surely disingenuous to ask for a change of commissioning arrangements and then assert that nothing will change. If something will change, let’s hear what that is and weigh the gains against the risks. I trust you feel that that is the right thing to say. Most local people do not know this debate is going on, so a little publicity may help to get the debate into focus.

Attached are this weeks IT stats: IT Performance Stats 18 April 2019

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