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Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 2 September

September 2, 2022

Next week the Trust Board will receive our winter plan for discussion and approval. We know that the issues that traditionally challenged us only during the colder months are now very real all through the year and our teams have been doing all they can to deliver safe patient care in very difficult circumstances.

NHS England have set out eight core areas for systems to focus on to improve resilience this winter:

  • Prepare for COVID-19 variants and respiratory challenges – including flu / COVID-19 campaigns
  • Increase capacity outside acute trusts – such as scaling up primary care and mental health
  • Increase resilience in NHS 111 and 999
  • Target improved ambulance response times and reduce hospital handover delays
  • Reduce crowding in EDs and target the longest waiters
  • Reduce hospital occupancy – including schemes such as virtual wards
  • Ensure timely discharge
  • Provide better support for people at home

I am sure we would all agree that these priority areas for improvement seem the right things to focus on and our own winter plan reflects our contributions to these issues.

Our objectives for winter are to:

  • Reduce admissions – through the diversion of patients away from our emergency departments where other, more suitable services are available, and improve access to diagnosis and treatment on the same day
  • Reduce length of stay in a hospital bed – through more timely discharge and increased access to services in the community
  • Maintain our planned care services so that patient conditions do not deteriorate further, causing urgent care intervention

Many of the schemes that we are establishing are part of the new acute care model, which is the transformation of our services required ahead of our move to Midland Met. Some are already in place, such as our integrated discharge hub,  and they will effectively become business as usual as we embed this new model.

Our schemes have been developed collaboratively with colleagues from across our clinical groups.

  1. Enhance our Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) function
  2. Expand the virtual ward capacity in the community with 140 beds in Sandwell and West Birmingham during November, continuing to increase over the winter months, with the right staffing in place to care for patients with more complex needs
  3. Open a new intermediate care facility, Harvest View, in Rowley Regis, in partnership with SMBC
  4. Deliver more services on an outpatient rather than inpatient basis such as our OPAT (outpatient parental antimocrobial therapy) service
  5. Integrated hub on our ED front doors to appropriately stream suitable patients out of hospitals
  6. Establish an urgent community response service for patients in the community who have had a fall
  7. Establish a seven day (8am to 6pm) Care Navigation Centre for all health and care practitioners (including the ambulance service) to use to better stream non-elective need/referrals

We are currently working with our system and place partners to ensure that our schemes join up with those being developed by partners, and to identify funding sources.

Delivering safe services for our patients this winter has to be all of our business. Even if you are not working in a front line service, you can play your part by ensuring your work is geared towards the delivery of safe patient care. Ensuring you have your flu and COVID-19 vaccination is an essential part of this and vaccinations will be available to all staff very soon!

Have a good weekend

Richard