Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 26 October
October 26, 2018
I am delighted that TeamTalk this month sees the launch of a whole variety of projects and programmes to help us to become a more engaged, “bottom up” organisation. We have been undertaking Listening into Action projects for many years with real success, and our Speak Up days have built a culture of participation. But we know from your feedback that engagement, advocacy and involvement vary across our Trust. In Primary Care, Community and Therapies, there are consistently high reported levels of satisfaction among our employees and colleagues. We want that everywhere. So, we asked you to contribute to prioritising the work of the Board and executive, and you voted for a focus in three areas:
- Better and reliable IT
- More and consistent approaches to flexible working
- Improved communication, especially about local changes.
We want to deliver on that ask, and prove once and for all that speaking up and asking for something to change makes a difference. By February the guidelines on flexible working in our organisation will be clearer, and it will be simple to understand how to ask for and how to challenge decisions around flexible working. Wherever we can, we want to help to balance home and work, but in any team that will mean some people can exercise flexibility, but possibly not everyone. On the other hand there are many things we do which are a clear endorsement of compassion and flexibility, like the new parental leave arrangements for premature births, or our commitment to offer part-time options for most roles in our workplace. In terms of communication not everyone has a face to face team brief each month. That truly has to change. We cannot pull together as one organisation if conversations are not happening locally. To support line manager’s a new fortnightly briefing note on myths and rumours will be issued, helping local leaders to answer your questions. None of that replaces myConnect, or Heartbeat, or this blog, all of which have a part to play.
On IT, we all know the symptoms. We are working hard on the cause and the treatment remedies. This week we have had our key systems on, and we have made stable our servers. There is more work to do in the days ahead. Our N3 connection is not yet as capable as we wish and we are organising routes to change that. The infrastructure and Wifi projects we announced, and then delayed, will move forward again in November. We are meeting with the new owners of the Winscribe company to see what they can offer us by way of a long term improvement in that systems’ performance. I attach the weekly IT stats. IT Performance Stats 26 October 2018
Unity is still a huge part of the answer both to replacing ICM and to ensuring that we have great clinical data, including electronic prescribing. The latest target date is early March for go-live, but we need everyone trained to make that happen safely.
Right now in our workplace many people have had the NHS national staff survey, and others will get our new quarterly weconnect survey, which replaces Your Voice, and takes us much further into understanding what motivates and excites and worries people responding, anonymously. In other places using this survey, like Wigan, they have seen that it provides a better insight into what needs to happen to improve wellbeing and satisfaction. Please do respond if you are in the sample for either survey. Do respond even if you are quite content. Definitely respond if you have ideas or things that are not ok where you work. This month’s TeamTalk has a super improvement story within it from pharmacy at City, whose change project came directly from voicing concerns to the Trust’s Board.
Getting ready for winter is about more than tackling flu. But since we are in that galaxy, if you have not yet had the jab, please do so in the next fortnight. Many of us have been vaccinated, but we need to cover the Trust to protect ourselves and our patients.
Being ready is also about making sure that we are able to provide extra services, both to tackle pressure, and to support safe discharge. I am delighted that the local Better Care Fund has agreed our project to wrap services around local care homes in partnership with general practice. And we have bids going forward for services to help homeless people, those with mental health conditions, and patients with alcohol misuse as part of their diagnosis. Meanwhile, I have included some terrific short films below from our colleagues in the emergency department who have started a project called SMART to make sure that rapid decisions are made on arrival at the Trust. That includes admitting decisions. No patient, who is stable for transfer, should remain in ED for clerking. On Thursday 1 November we go live with the Single Point of Access (SPA) triage service for local GP calls into the Trust. If you have queries about that development do get in touch with Nuhu Usman or Janice Barrett who have admirably led the project’s development over recent weeks. We want to make sure that only patients who need to be in an ED cubicle are there, so that the next patient arriving has a place to safely go. Over the last three months we have really struggled to get anywhere near the national NHS promise of four hour maximum stay. We have to make the most of the investment and help that we have had to change that. It matters to our patients, and we absolutely do not want to see a patient wait and be harmed. Let’s act now.
Hellomynameis…Toby.