Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 22 March
March 22, 2019
In New Zealand today there will be silence to remember the 50 people who were killed in the tragic attack in a mosque only a week ago. I know many colleagues have been affected by the tragic events, and members of our own Muslim community here at SWBH have been in touch to offer their support for colleagues and patients, thank you. We are planning some events with our well established and valued Muslim Liaison Group in coming months, which I hope many of you will get involved in, and show support and respect to our Muslim colleagues and local community. Please get in touch with me, Masood Hussain or Raffaela Goodby if you wish to get involved.
I hope you are finding our weekly Brexit bulletins of some use in giving you information on readiness for change. The key message is that we believe that we have prepared for changes in supply routes and data flows. If you know of examples where we are at risk do get in touch as it is a big Trust and important local detail can get lost. Our main job in coming days remains to reassure patients about their care, ensure that medicines use is as indicated by clinical advice, and make sure that if the change does see an uptick in abusive behaviour towards people who are perceived to be “foreign” we are overt and direct in challenging intolerance.
SWB Brexit Bulletin – 22 March 2019
Last week I wrote about our vacancy pledge for 2019-20. Based on a few emails I received, I thought it would be helpful to write a little more. Staffing establishments for next year have been set. Each directorate team has contributed to that. In the main they are set above professionals guidance (i.e. more staff). In a few cases they just touch on what is required. If you can see where you work examples where we do not meet those standards, do speak up. The bigger issue, in the view of the Board and Clinical Leadership Executive, is making sure that we can staff to those agreed and funded levels. Of course that means carrying on tackling sickness. It means reducing the amount of absence from shift time taken up with mandatory training that could be done online. It means making sure management meetings, and events, happen with good notice. It means staggering annual leave, even in March! But what it means beyond all else is redoubling our recruitment and retention efforts. We have a great story to tell about why to come and work here. But we also know from our weconnect surveys that first year employees often report lower engagement than long term staff. We need to understand and address that.
The vacancy pledge therefore is about making sure that we are aware at team, directorate, group, executive and board level of how many gaps we have in a given service. A rate of 2% vacancy plus 3% sickness is not ‘ok’, but it does set a marker for what we might expect if we were among the best few organisations in the NHS. To be clear, we are not reducing staffing to hit that target. The opposite is true we are hiring to hit that target. In some cases we will need to think creatively about that because it is obvious that simply re-advertising certain jobs will not bring in applicants. So our 2% aim is very ambitious but it is motivated by wanting to become obviously serious about stopping staffing gaps. I know this message will produce some emails about pensions and salaries. Neither are areas over which the Trust has discretion. What is clearly true however is that we have discretion over the calibre and nature of our teams, our IT, and the model of our leadership. What do I mean? Read on.
The teams rated good by the CQC typically have better staffing rates, higher morale, and better retention than those that rate less highly. This is a chicken and egg issue. Great team working leads to better ratings which leads to higher morale which leads to better retention. But better retention leads to better staffing which leads to better ratings. You can guess why we are focusing on this issue in coming months. A small part of that is about management and leadership capability. Some great work has been done this year to support accredited managers and to work with line managers on their skills, confidence and empowerment. The PDR process (please insert your date via the portal on Connect) give employees and managers a chance to have one to one conversations, and any good manager in that process will ask for feedback from people in their team. We will be developing over the next ten weeks our Managers’ Code of Conduct to reinforce some of the best behaviours and make it explicit what behaviours we don’t expect. I know that groups like our Freedom to Speak Up Guardians sometimes see or hear of the less good behaviours and I want to work with them to help give anyone recourse to stop unacceptable behaviour. Sometimes that behaviour will be a one off and an apology works. But if it is sustained then we need to call it out and tackle it. Whatever is the perceived experience of the past, the firm intent is that in 2019-20 we address our weakest points to help drive the best more widely in the Trust. We cannot be fully staffed if we have leadership behaviours that encourage low morale or people to want to work elsewhere.
If a team has a vacancy rate of above 2% on 1 July we will be working through with you what is to be done. And to be clear our budgets are set on the basis that we will hire to 98% of our roles. So, simply, staffing gaps are not a money issue. They are not just how it is. They are something that we can do some things about. Many teams do those things already and coming months will see us try and work to make those things commonplace but also work to address specific issues where the general approach will not work. That kind of specificity is exactly what is going on now in A&E, and this week another emergency care consultant joined our team, attracted I know by the quality of colleagues, but also the opportunities of the new hospital.
I may have mentioned in other messages that in 2019-20 we will spend 40% more than in any prior year on training and development. For example we are rolling out a major programme around Mid Line insertion at ward level, and developing all of our band 6 nurses to have those competencies. The next few weeks will see our first Nurse Apprentice graduates, and I know that we have some enthusiasm now for the Nurse Escalator which provides a route from band 5 to band 6, and will in due course provide a clear route from band 2 to band 3. The entry to these opportunities remains your Aspiring to Excellence PDR. Of course that will include a discussion about smoking, if relevant, about Unity, which is relevant to everyone, and about internal communication, ditto. But it is really a conversation about your needs, and about honest reflection on your objectives. In a large organisation it is not good the Board having objectives and the Trust having nice plans, if objectives do not travel both up and down the organisation. So please get involved with what is going on, and if you are anxious about your PDR please speak up and let’s work through what that anxiety is. Every discipline in the Trust is going through the same process, executives, ward service officers, consultant colleagues, or health visitors. This is a habit we want to get into and one that will help us with big projects like moving into Midland Met, but also with the very big intention to help each person in our workforce feel part of the team, and someone who is valued.
In addition to the weekly Brexit news, I keep publishing the weekly IT stats. You will appreciate that outtages have sharply reduced, helpdesk queries are getting resolved faster and better, but real issues remain. We will be replacing our N3 connection in coming weeks, and the team have started work again on checking every PC and printer across our sites so that we can measure up the criteria we need to agree our Unity go live. April’s QIHD will see us launch 28 days of activity to support that go live, so get ready for some games, some training, some tests and a big opportunity to work with the product and make Unity part of who we are as an organisation.
Attached are this weeks stats: IT Performance Stats 22 March 2019
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