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Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 29 September

September 29, 2023

One of the many responsibilities of being a Chief Executive is giving Churchillian addresses (!) to teams in the organisation on a variety of subjects. This week I addressed hugely important away day session hosted by the Midland Met programme company team and attended by clinical group leaders from across our organisation. The subject matter of the session was preparing for and delivering success in the MMUH care model and socialising the detailed and well thought through operational readiness process for our new hospital. All this of course is through the lens of it now being around one year before our new hospital receives its first patients. If ever there was a moment to reflect on the immediacy of the conclusion of the programme and to begin to conclude our work on service redesign and staff engagement, then this was it.

My address to the team reminded colleagues of the context in which we are working at present. Industrial unrest, urgent care pressures, financial pressures, enhanced regulatory expectation, and working in a health and care system in which the lines of accountability are far less clear than they once were, add to the collective challenge that the NHS faces at present. In that a maelstrom of issues, the job of the chief executive and other leaders and the organisation is to give our colleagues hope for the future. That is no easy task for most NHS leaders at the moment. However, my speech reminded our clinical teams at the away day, that Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust is better placed than many to not just provide that hope to our frontline staff but also to deliver meaningful change. The reason why we are uniquely placed is because there is no other organisation in the NHS at present, that is going to benefit from such a transformation of service and workforce, as we will, through the Midland Met. We simply must, despite the unrelenting pressure of doing our transformation work for the Midland Met at the same time as handling the pressures I described above, grab this once in a generation opportunity with both hands.

I know that I have set this out many times before, but it does not harm to rehearse them again. The Midland Met care model, both in terms of our community services and our acute hospital services, should transform patient outcomes, staff experience our population health in the longer term. This is because:

  • For patients, we must make the service transformations that are required to deliver the lower bed occupancy and improved clinical resilience the Midland Met should provide. As a result, care delivered as close to home as possible with a more responsive acute hospital intervention if required, will significantly change what our patients experience and get from us. Moreover, the radical change to the clinical environment of much of our acute hospital estate will bring benefits to our patients as well.
  • For our staff, we are investing in team development, inclusive leadership and in recruitment. The Midland Met provides us with the ultimate lever for change in all three of these areas. If we do not make change in this space, then we run the risk of just cutting and pasting our current staff experience into that beautiful new building or into our redesigned community pathways and that would be a huge missed opportunity.
  • For our local population, the “home first” care model and the focus on improved long term condition management, should make changes to the declining healthy life expectancy of people in Sandwell, Ladywood and Perry Barr.  Moreover, the catalyst factor that the Midland Met provides for a deprived part of the borough, we are confident will bring both economic unemployment benefits to the local population. We must strive to achieve the aim of healthier people and healthier places.

Our new hospital is almost a reality.  Let us not miss this opportunity to provide hope for the future and deliver real change for our patients, our people, and our population.

Yesterday I joined colleagues in the Courtyard Gardens at Sandwell Hospital to celebrate National Inclusion Week – dedicated to celebrating inclusion and taking action to create inclusive workplaces. I am proud to lead an organisation where we are always striving to become a more inclusive workplace. Inclusion is critical to our workplace, and we must all work together to make equal and diverse spaces everywhere we go. This does not mean you have to know everything, but understanding what inclusivity means is a good place to start.

And there is an opportunity for you to have your say on inclusion in our workplace and other matters in the upcoming national staff survey which launches on Monday and will be open for two months. For the first time this year our active bank only staff will also be given the opportunity to have their say.

Please do take the time to give your feedback when you receive the survey. Our people plan was developed to support you to have a great experience at work and the staff survey responses play a central role in that

Have a good week.

Richard