Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 21 February
February 21, 2020
On Tuesday next, our clinical leadership executive will discuss priorities for medical and clinical equipment purchase. We will be investing more than £2m again in 2020 to update, replace and improve services, with recommendations from the team led by Lawrence Barker. All of us can usually think of gaps or omissions in what we have to do our work but I hope you are encouraged that our hard work allows us to make these decisions and get the kit we need quickly. If you are reading this and listing all the kit you don’t have, get in touch. Before we spend anything we will go back through the risk register to make sure we are addressing your highest rated concerns: Image storage in BMEC for example!
Cleaning our equipment, whether it is mattresses or drip stands, or anything else, matters too. Review this week with our senior nursing team suggests we have real work to do in March to get this consistently right. Part of our regime to improve care but also to meet CQC standards will be ensuring that every ward and clinical department is up to date each week with cleaning schedules. Something can get missed, but each team needs a plan and a checklist for a set of tasks that could be everyone’s job, not just our excellent ward service officers. I wrote here last week about perhaps controversial changes we are making in office cleaning, and the review this week of clinical areas brought home to me again the need to tilt our emphasis to get patient-facing cleaning right. It’s a habit. And one we need to have.
Our medical director, David Carruthers, was on hand this week to do the honours with our Star of the Week. Labour Ward manager Cath Price was nominated by her colleague and fellow midwife Charlotte Duhig for the support she provided as Charlotte joined the team.
The developing situation with Coronavirus remains a concern to us all. Our PODs for assessment are now in place near each ED, and we issued this week revised guidance for the triage and treatment of children. If you are unsure of our processes or protocols please ask. That “speak up” message applies too if you are fearful of yourself working with patients who might have the virus, as our approach expects that all clinical employees will be able to undertake such care. As we have advised before it is important to ensure that, even where someone’s travel history includes the most effected countries, we examine all options as well as this condition as confirmed cases in the UK remain thankfully rare. I want to thank teams in ED and infection control for what is currently a lot of work to make ready and also to care for individual folk who arrive and need our help.
Next week’s Board Public Health, Community Development and Equality committee will re-discuss interpreting provision. The Trust is so fortunate to have some fantastic interpreting staff on our bank, and access to language line, on which I sense there are mixed views. But review of data for our use suggests that take-up is really patchy. It is clear there are real practical issues faced by frontline teams in using these services and we are sometimes resorting to using family members to translate, which is fraught with risk and directly contradicts our longstanding policy and guidance. During 2020 we will start work to tackle this, as we aim by 2021 to be sure that every person we care for can indeed understand their consultation and we can hear their voice properly. If you do have ideas in this area please do let me know. In this Trust, with the communities we serve, we believe that it is right that we standout for excellence in supporting our patients, and you, to make sure we succeed.
You know that in 2019 we agreed to partner with Engie for future provision of some of our estate services. Part of that collaboration is developing our Energy and Sustainability work. We want to achieve net carbon zero status as a Trust, and to work to support sustainable green transport and energy consumption in our system. As it happens the whole NHS is about to launch something similar. We have made good progress holding energy consumption and cost just about level over recent years, and as the grid itself becomes greener our use does too. Notwithstanding that it was exciting to see funding given for local canals as an energy source and we are looking at geothermal options and others inside the Trust, before pricing the offset costs (tree planting mainly) we will need to meet for the remaining fossil fuel consumption that we have. There is still work we can do on misuse and we are looking at how smart technology adjusts room lighting and temperature for use. At the same time, we are discussing our collaboration with National Express to consider how bus networks and routes can be better integrated with our sites as they move to a wholly sustainable fleet which could offer many people a better, cheaper and faster route to and from work, or in the case of patients and visitors an improved journey to our care. Of course first we should consider whether face to face care is necessary, and what we can do locally not in a central site location. As that implies the subject is one that has the potential to turn upside down some of what we have long done, and as we develop our 2025 ambitions as a Trust we need to examine from first principles the model of care that we use and the whole community impact of how we work.
Heartbeat’s out next week. We no longer issue paper payslips as you will know, so you can get your remuneration information by logging into your ESR record (everyone we employs has except just less than 300 people; so we know it works). You can do that from your desktop, laptop, home computer or mobile phone by going to https://my.esr.nhs.uk/
These changes mean you need to search for your copy of our monthly magazine or look online. If there are no Heartbeat copies near you do get in touch with comms as the post room team are working through our new delivery schedule! We very much want to keep you involved and informed and will continue with paper copies despite the environmental impact. The February Heartbeat issue has more on the Year of the Midwife and Nurse at the Trust, as well as lots on our University hospital.
If you have missed our February film explaining our future site changes, take a look here https://youtu.be/mOmyEChBHdE
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