Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 26 April
April 26, 2019
One month into the new public sector year, our Trust feels busier than ever. Thank you to everyone working so hard to manage additional arrivals in our Emergency Departments. We have as well many additional referrals into our planned care services which we were expecting. Thank you to those getting ready for the new adult community 48 hour ‘trial’ project, under which all discharged patients will be contacted by our PCCT teams to assess their onward needs and discharge experience. Many of our safety indicators are showing continued improvements: Despite a region wide rise in breast cancer referrals the service is growing to meet need and we have met our cancer wait standards again in the last quarter, our ward clinical teams are consistently screening over 90% of all indicated sepsis risk patients, and I know that many clinical teams are now getting on top of results acknowledgement in radiology (a process which will be hugely aided by Unity).
Against that backdrop on Monday we launch our 2019 Star Awards. The ceremony in October can feel an age away (Villa might be promoted by then), but it is not too early to think now about your nominations. All of our traditional categories will be back for a fifth year running. The all colleague vote will happen in August and September, but, as they say, you need to be in it to win it. So please take a moment to think about anyone you have given a Shout Out to, or anyone you could have celebrated. Just being put forward means a great deal to someone, and it takes moments to do. Remember local winners go onto national glory and just this week we had the fantastic news that our Anaesthetic and Peri-operative team @ SWBH has won the “Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine team of the year” at the recent 2019 National Annual BMJ awards!
You may have noticed an ever increasing Trust-wide emphasis on environmental impacts on the public’s health and so this year we have added our Green Award into the roll of honour. By the summer, plastic hand wash bowls will go from our wards replaced by pulp bowls, and before winter I know that Kevin Reynolds will have put in even more LED lighting and other changes to tackle our energy efficiency obligations.
You may know already that on June 20th we will be joining others to celebrate international clean air day. That is, of course, just a fortnight before we go Smoke Free. In January next year the Clean Air Zone comes into operation in central Birmingham as part of the Brum Breathes project being spearheaded by one of our Trust non-executive directors, Waseem Zaffar. I hosted this week, alongside Kelly Redden-Rowley and Arvind Rajasekaran from respiratory medicine, the first West Birmingham and Sandwell Clean Air Partnership event. With 900 lives lost in the city each year to poor air quality, and a significant impact on childhood asthma and other conditions, there is every reason for us to be part of this valuable collaboration. We want to be at the front of queue with the Local Enterprise Partnership and the West Midlands Combined Authority as we tackle issues of air pollution in housing and in transport – and we absolutely should see these changes as an economic opportunity for local business and communities, not just as a disruption in where we drive or how we get to work. There will be loads more information about the CAZ over the summer, and of course we are taking our own initial steps in this space by removing day-time car park passes from anyone living within a mile of our sites from June.
Before the weather turned, we managed to get our Step Into Spring event complete, with lots of opportunities to share wellbeing services and other projects. Next week, we keep that participatory spirit going with both our 28-day Unity challenge, and our fourth Speak Up day on Wednesday May 1st. The latest employee engagement survey data is incredibly encouraging. Not only has more than one in three folk responded to the weconnect survey, but our overall engagement outcome has sustained from January’s results. It is clear that people feel trusted and involved. But fairness at work remains an issue for us to tackle. As I have written about here before we are consulting now on our manager’s code of conduct guide, as we look to make it very clear what our norms will be. And the flexible working pledges we announced in February are taking effect and we are collating data to make sure that everyone has fair access to altered working patterns and reasonable adjustments.
This week we got to fantastic news that an extra £12.5m has been given to the Trust in recognition of our financial good practice and discipline. I left that till last in my message because none of us come to work in the NHS for the money. On the other hand, Lawrence Barker presented to the Clinical Leadership Executive for review on Tuesday over £4m of new clinical equipment investments that we are prioritising now. It is possible to create a virtuous cycle around public funds, and there is every reason to believe that our local model and our local approach is beginning to succeed in that regard. Rod Knight, Pam Tura and Paul North’s draft final business case for Midland Met is shaping up nicely and shows how we will be able to re-invest around £6m a year of new money in expanding primary care and mental health care to wrap around what we do in acute care from 2022. We have always said that a new hospital both depends on and enables better out of hospital services and we are resolute in wanting to defy the NHS-norm whereby such words are warm but empty.
SWB Brexit Bulletin – 26 April 2019
Attached are this weeks IT stats:IT Performance Stats 26 April 2019
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