Skip to content Skip to main menu Skip to utility menu

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 7 June

June 7, 2024

With a little under four months until we open our doors to Midland Metropolitan University Hospital, length of stay (LOS) is a continuing issue for us. We are at risk of not being able to fit into the new hospital and one of the main determinants of this is that some patients stay in our hospital beds for too long.

We still have work to do around bed fit /rightsizing into the new hospital and there are several improvements (as part of our overall urgent care project in our annual plan) that are on-going which target this. These include frailty, medical SDEC, virtual wards , heart failure, falls and respiratory and we can take reassurance that we have seen some sustained improvement from many of these schemes.

I want to thank you all for your hard work supporting this, but now we really need to heighten the focus of our actions in three areas.

So, to accelerate this work and progress us to fit into the hospital we are adopting a quality improvement sprint methodology based on :-

  • Ward-based length of stay on medical wards – our length of stay has gone up by 15 per cent since December 2022
  • Our pathway via medical SDEC
  • Streaming of urgent care patients presenting at our two emergency departments.

In December 2022, we were within the safe threshold on bed utilisation to fit into MMUH, but with now less than 16 weeks to go we need your help and professional expertise to solve this issue and allow us to fit at ease into the new hospital. If you are part of this work or asked to support, please do so, we need your valuable insight and input to get us safely over the line.

In other MMUH updates, this week we started the Abbott track system installation, this complements the Abbott Anility analysers that were installed recently and brings a new level of process automation to pathology. The cardiac catheter labs are being installed with the first one arriving and being installed this week and imaging work has started with the installation of our new SPECT/CT scanner in nuclear medicine.

We have also now had over 600 staff sign up for their staff induction site tour. It is imperative that you do this before we move so, if you are yet to sign up, please do so by clicking here.

As you will also be aware with the Trust move to agile working  and to help everyone adjust smoothly there is a whole host of information available on Connect. We are also running a series of interactive webinars. These will provide expert insights, tips and a chance to ask any questions that you or your team may have and are designed to be supportive and informative. The full list of dates can be found by clicking here.

Finally, I would also like to say a huge thank you to all our volunteers for their dedication to the Trust. As you may be aware, this week is Volunteers’ Week which is an annual celebration of the fantastic contribution millions of volunteers make across the UK. Right here at the SWB, we have a number of volunteers who support us to deliver first-class healthcare to our patients. To celebrate the awareness week, we hosted two special events to thank all our volunteers for their hard work over the last 12 months.

Have a good weekend.

Kind regards,
Richard