Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 29 December

December 29, 2023

I was privileged and delighted to be able to take two weeks leave before Christmas, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I am very conscious that many of you have not had that privilege and therefore the worst that a miserable British winter can throw at us has been borne by you all with very little time off. Despite that, I do sincerely hope that you all got the opportunity to spend some quality time with family and friends over the festive period. You have all deserved that time with your loved ones.

Now Christmas is over, I am inevitably turning my attentions to the New Year. 2024 is going to be a massive year for Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust.  This is because 2024 WILL be the year of our move into the Midland Metropolitan University Hospital. In less than 12 months from now, we will have moved all our acute surgical, medical, emergency, critical care, maternity, paediatric and neonatal services from the long serving and largely tired buildings at our City and Sandwell sites, to Midland Met. Less than 12 months from now, we will have established our urgent treatment centre and elective care hub at Sandwell Hospital. Less than 12 months from now we will have needed to have maximised our investment and transformation in community services and admission avoidance, to make our acute bed occupancy dream become a reality. In around 12 months time, we will be establishing our urgent treatment centre on the Midland Met site and shortly thereafter, our learning campus, offering over 1,200 additional vocational education opportunities per year, will be opening.

We have waited a long, long time for this year to come around and it is now upon us. I am sure you will agree that the potential for the Midland Met to radically improve our patient care, our staff satisfaction and our wider populations’ health and employment is significant. It truly will be a care model that, if effectively deployed, will deliver immediate and longer-term benefits for our Patients, People and Population. However, these benefits won’t just happen. They need to be driven by us all, through changes in practice.  For the avoidance of doubt, 2024 needs to be the year not just of the MMUH move, but also of improvement and change.  To illustrate:

For our patients: Getting our “Fundamentals of Care” right for all our patients – on nutrition, on communication with patients/carers, on deterioration, on discharge planning and on patient flow.  We also have a massive opportunity to improve our theatre and outpatient utilisation in advance of our MMUH move, so we hit the ground running and maximise the physical separation of elective and emergency care.  Our waiting lists are unacceptably long.  2024 must be the year we start to bring them down, meaningfully.

For our people : Effectively managing the complex management of change process and team development work needed for the safe occupancy of the Midland Met. Developing our leaders in compassionate and inclusive leadership consistent with our organisational values. Rolling out the priority positive action we can take in recruitment and people policies, so that our staff and leaders better reflect the diversity of our local communities. The MMUH will be a huge attraction to potential new colleagues, and we should cash in on this by making our whole organisation, a place where people want to stay.  How staff are led and engaged is key to success here and we cannot continue to see the apparent levels of disengagement that our staff opinion survey response rates imply. Our next Pulse survey launches on 2 January, and I would really like to see a much better response rate – more responses give us more accurate data, which we can use to drive forward real change – please do look out for it and take five minutes to complete it.

For our population: Developing the approach of and capacity of, our neighbourhood community teams, working in partnership with primary care, much of which we now host, to better manage long term conditions and to start to tackle the lifestyles of those at greatest risk of developing chronic disease.  To continue to be ahead of other places in Birmingham and the Black Country, on the use of virtual wards, care home admission avoidance and urgent community response, so our MMUH care model can continue to be one that emphasises community first and hospital as a last resort.

As I make clear above, none of this will be delivered by saying it.  None of it will be delivered by senior leaders or Board members.  It must be delivered by you – our front-line practitioners and support staff.  If you don’t bring these essential changes in the field of Patients, People and Population to reality, then we may well move into the Midland Met, but that move will not be a successful or transformative one.

2024 – must be the year not just of the move, but also of change and improvement. You will bring that change about. Let’s make it happen.

Have a good week – and happy New Year to you all.