Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 4 January

January 4, 2019

I promised this week’s message would be one of announcements. So here goes.

Firstly, we now have the permissions we need to advertise for the final contractor to complete Midland Met. This includes agreement to all the cost incurred so far, the monies granted late last year to help maintain City Hospital to 2022, and funds to meet the future costs of the delay, including the need for a second pathology laboratory for longer than our Black Country Pathology Service business case envisaged. Aided by our firm discipline on finance and delivery of this year’s budget, and conscious of the huge need to rationalise acute care into a single specialist site, we continue to have the confidence of investors to spend taxpayers’ money wisely and get the new hospital open in around 36 months time. The advert to do so is out today.

Secondly, we are now allowed to confirm that we have been awarded two Primary Care GP contracts. This is a big step for the Trust and will happen in partnership with Urban Health in Handsworth, and with Your Health Partnership in West Bromwich. YHP are also our partners in applying to build a GP surgery on the Sandwell Hospital site, and planning consent is expected in February. Taken together with the work we are doing with Black Country Family Practice in Tipton, as we look to make the Neptune Centre a key western hub for our outpatient work, and with Tower Hill on the A34 (by the Scott Arms) the Trust is getting closer to our 2020 Vision for care integration. This is a vision about all of us changing how we work and what we do, and focusing more and more time on a risk stratified view of our population’s health needs.

The hat trick is completed by the appointment of four new medical leaders. Just before Christmas we interviewed for a team of medical leaders to support David Carruthers with the responsibilities of the medical director. The posts join our operational Clinical Group Directors, and work alongside Kath Gill who is our acting Research and Development Director, and Julian Chilvers, our Director of Medical Education. The new roles place medical leadership even more deeply at the heart of the Trust, as we look to ensure a clinically led organisation. From a great field, we selected the following colleagues who will start in post in the spring: Mark Anderson will take on the role with responsibility for supporting doctors’ professional standards. Chizo Agwu will take a lead role on our quality plan, including reducing amenable mortality. Sarb Clare will work on quality improvement in acute care, while Ansu Basu will take a similar role focused on how we work with other hospitals and especially with primary care. Heartbeat in April will include a profile of many of our medical leaders, so that everyone in the Trust knows who holds the responsibilities for both influencing and deciding how we work and what we do. I wish to offer the thanks of the Board to Nigel Trudgill who has served as deputy medical director for some years and really established the remit of the role, and Carol Cobb who has led on implementing our medical examiners roles. Both will step down when our new appointees commence.

A quick quiz to end my message with:

Are you one of the 952 colleagues who has more than two out of date mandatory training courses on your file? With a few weeks to go until March you need to act now if your PDR outcome is not to adversely effected by mandatory training non-compliance. You cannot rate above a 2 for performance if you are not compliant (over 2000 colleagues already are compliant). And from April 2019, of course, anyone paid under Agenda for Change will not get their salary increment if they are not mandatory training compliant – a national policy not local.
Are you one of the 852 colleagues whose Basic Life Support training looks like it is not up to date? It takes five minutes to get this competency check done. On January 11th non-compliant individuals will be contacted via their line manager, given that we said we would be complete by Christmas 2018. I hope you agree this is a safety issue.
Are you one of the 63 employees who has not had your 2017/18 PDR? This is, clearly, a very serious matter and one that is now subject to conduct and disciplinary action. I am sure there is still time in January to get the PDR done or properly recorded and put the issue to bed. Don’t wait, act.

We employ over 6000 people. And the numbers above mean that you can guess that almost everyone is hitting the basic standards of PDR and training compliance. Thank you. The NHS is busy and demands can seem unrelenting. Even though these are the basics, they take time and trouble to get right. I appreciate the effort you make.

If you are struggling do get in touch with your line manager, with me, or with Raffaela Goodby and Bethan Downing in the People and OD team. We want to work with you to help. Everyone is busy and things get missed. The Trust will only succeed if we are all able to do our best and meet the core standards our patients expect and most colleagues here meet. Let’s work together to make sure you are on the team.

Best wishes for 2019. There is a great deal to look forward to. Next week I will focus more of my message on our IT, as we countdown to the Unity Full Dress Rehearsal in five weeks time. Do get your training booked before January 31st. But you know that….

Attached are this week’s IT statistics: IT Performance Stats 4 January 2019

#hellomynameis…Toby