Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 3 August

August 3, 2018

With Heartbeat this month we issued the final shortlist for the 2018 Star Awards. Congratulations to everyone nominated, and especially to those the judging panels selected. They go forward to our ceremony at Villa Park in October. Before then of course, you can vote for your choice as employee of the year and our three team awards too. Today I have circulated an email explaining how and over the next few weeks the communications bulletin will continue to remind you how to vote for your choice.

The sense of excellence engendered by the awards process was also a big feature of the Board meeting we held yesterday. We continue to see teams excelling in, among other things, providing short wait care, meeting safety plan standards and cutting cancellations. And for the third month running in July we achieved 100% compliance with the WHO Safer Surgery checklist. It is more than a year since we reported a Never Event in our Trust. Of course we have work to do to create a short wait model for emergency care. And our work on sepsis needs to help us to tackle avoidable harm and deaths in our care that could be prevented through more rapid assessment and intervention. Thank you to all our ward leaders working hard to create clear expectations and systems to manage sepsis care better.

I attach the latest IT scorecard, as we work towards no outstanding critical systems alerts in the weeks ahead. A complete reboot of our WiFi takes place in August, designed to tackle slow speeds now, and get us ready for programmes within Unity that depend on coverage. At the same time we are in the final stage of planning changes to our network infrastructure to try and improve resilience. Audit work across 215 IT systems has given rise to recommendations for changes, replacements and improvements, to be made over the next six months. Of course some systems rely on Unity to provide that replacement, notably ICM. Thank you to the more than 2,100 of you already booked in for your Unity training and that figure needs to double over the next fortnight. Once trained you have access to the product’s play domain which obviously let’s you explore and learn at your own pace.

Local media have reported widely already yesterday’s decision to ask DHSC and Treasury for public finance to complete Midland Met in 2022. This would replace a private finance model, which we had chosen in 2014 and earlier this year. That request reflects in particular the construction industry and other’s view of the risk profile of the project. I know many staff will have deeply held views about PFI, and we now consider that for this specific scheme, which is two thirds built, a public option would narrowly be the best way to go forward. Separately we will consider later this year whether to operate the estate and hard facilities functions ourselves or ask another private provider to do that. Either way we will see construction work back on site at Midland Met in short order now, with an invitation to tender issued this coming week for remedial works on the site over the following six months. It may take a few weeks for Whitehall to formally respond to the Board’s preference but I am cautiously optimistic that we will have certainty later this summer. What we know with confidence is that the new build will open in 2022. If we can open before the Commonwealth Games, we will!

Finally, as we move through August, we are nearing completion of our Aspiring to Excellence first year of PDRs. Moderation is going on now to test whether managers have operated similarly and fairly Trust-wide. This is our first year so there are bound to be teething troubles. What is most important is that everyone in our organisation now has a set of improvement objectives that describe our own plans and those agreed with your line manager to deliver better outcomes for our team and our patients. If you are reading this and do not recognise that, please get in touch with Bethan Downing, with Raffaela Goodby or with me. I do understand debates about scoring, but for 2018/19 it is most important we all set off on the same path. The Board will be testing whether we invest in potential and rightly so. This Trust is yours and our decision to invest ever more heavily in training and in development is a large part of our 2020 vision and what we are trying to achieve, not only in the next twelve months but over coming years. You will tell us, in your next PDR, and in Your Voice (which is out now) whether that strategy is succeeding. Remember Your Voice this time has a prize draw with three prizes for entries, but you do have to be in it, to win it!

Featured in the photos Top – L – R Meena Khatun, Continence HCA; Raffaela Goodby, Director of People and Organisation Development; Simon Lines, Student District Nurse. Bottom – L – R Andrea Austin, Val Hutchinson, Toby Lewis and Jean Lee.