Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 23 February

February 26, 2018

Next week sees the go live for Purple Point. This is a seven day service to hear from patients and their relatives about what we do well, but also to get feedback and take immediate action on concerns. The service will operate in various local languages and run from 9am until 9pm. Any one of us could get a call from the governance support unit team. When you do there are two questions:

Can you take steps to address the concern please?
Can you get in touch with the person who has raised the concern and talk them through either what you have done, what you are about to do, or why their concern is not one we share?

David Carruthers and Elaine Newell have released brief explanatory short films outlining what the service is for and why it matters. Time and again I hear a conversation questioning whether we take Patient Experience seriously here. I think we do. That is why we changed the eye casualty model. Why we have moved our emergency gynaecology unit? Why we have made several recent investments to change our environment? But this service is a huge change and commitment to wanting to get things right for every patient, and crucially for their carers, friends and family too.

Do feel free to use the service if your loved one is with us, and to draw it to your patients’ attention. It is not instead of what CNPs, shift leaders, and many others do each day to address concerns face to face. But it does provide a safety net. Another option. An unambiguous opportunity to make sure we can hear about problems while something can be done to address them.

Next week sees a a couple of other things too. Including more digital champion training! The Board meets and will consider further proposals on specialist pathology services, our staffing establishments for ward inpatient areas, and our future capital programme. Our strategy remains to invest. In technology, in our estate, and especially in training and staffing. But of course our one off spend, our capital, is funded through our income per patient, our revenue. As we go into next year we have balanced our books using some one off items, and we know we need to reduce expenditure safely from April. If we do not succeed, then we will need to cancel or defer capital spend. That would be the first year that that has been our approach, but if we are to remain a going concern, and manage our finances prudently then that is the right approach. The best way to invest is therefore safely to save, and I know everyone is looking for ideas and working to spend wisely. If you do have more ideas on how we can save money without damaging safety standards do get in touch, or if you prefer to email our finance team, please do so via swbh.finance.reports@nhs.net

The trust board is also holding a strategy away day. This will happen with our senior clinical leaders. It will also include a number of local GPs. This is because to deliver our 2020 Vision, and certainly to create our 2025 Ambitions, we need to do that not as an organisation but as a system, and in particular working smartly and effectively with GPs. From April a significant number of follow up outpatient appointments in certain key specialties will be undertaken for us by local primary care organisations. This will create time and space for us to give more attention to new referrals, in other words patients without a definitive diagnosis or agreed treatment plan, who need our expertise. After a number of years of good pilot work to integrate care, and of course some large scale successful changes in diabetes in particular, the year ahead will see us try and move much more quickly to integrate what we do with local general practice. My sense is that most frontline clinical colleagues support this strategy, but if you do have reservations or questions, do get in touch, or contact your Group Directors. If you have specific questions about the arrangements with Modality in terms of outpatients, please raise those with Liam Kennedy or Dottie Tipton.