Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 24 November

November 29, 2023

Today is the last opportunity to complete the staff survey and for you to have your say on what it’s like to work at Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust – it closes this evening at 5pm.

You, our people, are the greatest asset we have, without you, we can’t improve the health outcomes and life chances of our patients and our community and that’s why you are at the heart of our new Trust strategy, patients, people, and population. I am often told, and indeed I feel it myself, that this is one of the friendliest trusts that colleagues have ever worked in, yet we struggle to get a good response rate to the survey. At the point of me writing this message, we are on 27%, that’s only 2,116 of you that have completed it.

Some feedback I have heard is that some colleagues feel that we don’t take the results seriously enough, or that they don’t see any action as a result of it and therefore don’t fill it in. As chief executive of this organisation, the staff survey results are one of the most important documents I receive into my inbox. They are discussed at exec meetings, at Board, at Trust Management Committee – the results do matter. We have already discussed how we can make them more meaningful to you and we have made a commitment to the Board that we will have tangible actions as a result of this year’s feedback – that’s why it’s so important that we hear the views of as many of you as possible.

The bigger the response rate to the survey, means we have a larger statistical view of how you feel and more ideas for improvement are generated, that’s why I am asking you today, if you haven’t already (and that’s a lot of you!) please do spend 10 minutes completing your survey.

I know that things have been tough lately and time might have been hard to come by, however we have QIHD today, and I have asked all managers to pause for 10-15 minutes to allow you the time to complete it.

The survey link is unique to you – you will find it in your e-mails by searching they can search their e-mails for Staff Survey 2023, and it will come from picker_surveys@picker.org.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you all for you hard work over this week and last. Sustained pressure on our emergency departments and patients staying in our acute beds for longer periods of time led us to declare a critical incident. The response from you all was impressive – indeed I think I saw the best of our organisation during last week – but this must become the norm.

Over the next two weeks, you will hear lots of talk about our ‘Winter Ambition’ – this is to make things better for you and better for our patients. It starts with two focus weeks, one at City Hospital (w/c 27 November) and one at Sandwell Hospital (w/c 4 December). These weeks will see teams of colleagues (including myself and the rest of the executive team) having a focus on unblocking and resolving issues ‘in real time’ in order to help us maintain good patient flow throughout the hospital. I must stress however, that it’s not just about having these weeks and then going back to our usual ways of working – it’s about taking learning and implementing it into our business as usual.

Those of you who were keeping an eye on the HSJ Awards last week might have noticed that we had a couple of winners from our area. One of which was Flourish, a project run by one of our two place partnerships – NHS Ladywood and Perry Barr, which is part of the Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Partnership. They scooped the NHS Race Equality Award for their work in reducing inequalities thorough creative school and community-based interventions. Congratulations to everyone involved.

Finally, staying on the subject of integrated working, you may have seen information about new shared care records which are now live, enabling the sharing of health and social care data across the Black Country and West Midlands.

Two regional shared care records are now linked to Unity and SystmOne. These are major sources of clinical data which provide us access to clinical information from health and social care organisations across the Black Country (One Health and Care) and the West Midlands (West Midlands Shared Care Record,which includes UHB).

These two systems are allowing us to share blood results, radiology, allergies, and visit data between us and other organisations across secondary care, primary care, community trusts, WMAS and social care. Further expansion in the future will allow us to share clinical documents.

The aim is to provide the best possible access to high quality data to improve patient outcomes and save staff and clinician time, by:

· Enhancing collaborative working between individuals and organisations

· Providing colleagues the information needed to make faster and more accurate decisions -reducing the need to order repeat tests and / or request records from other organisations

· Reducing the burden on patients to relay key information with each new contact

A lot of work has gone into the getting this system live across SWB and I would like to thank those who have been involved – if we can use this system effectively – our patient flow will be quicker, patient experience will be better and we will be on our way to achieving our winter ambition.

Have a good weekend.

Richard.