Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 8 March

March 8, 2019

The Trust Board met this week at the Black Country Living Museum. This fantastic venue accommodates over 350,000 visitors every year on the edge of our catchment near Tipton and plays a major role in education and learning for children across the region. Much of their work is in line with the work we are doing to bring our Trust closer to local schools and the young people that we serve. We heard from Museum Director, Andrew Lovett, about their plans for the future and his thoughts on adding health and wellbeing to their offering to visitors. The Board also heard about the progress of our Black Country Pathology partnership which is now over 6 months old and is making real progress sharing skills and ideas across the four Trusts.

Part of our community reach as a Trust comes through the work of Your Trust Charity and this week has seen projects launched to provide bedside reading support to children in our paediatric wards and provision of support packs for patients undergoing chemotherapy. Sally’s Sunshine Packs have been created by cancer patient, Sally Gutteridge, who wanted to make a difference for others so she has filled them with all those little things that can help bring comfort or pass the time.

Today marks International Women’s Day and of course more than three quarters of the people who work in our organisation are female. The Trust needs to continue to ensure that we are fair in our policies and practices but also that we take every step to promote and support women in every profession in our workforce. On May 22nd Dr Sarb Clare and many others will host a ‘Women Empowering Women’ conference in the Postgraduate Centre at City Hospital. You will remember that last month the Trust launched our flexible working commitment. That project is aimed at all members of staff and it is clearly important that how we employ and how we develop our careers meets the varied needs of those with additional caring responsibilities, commitments and interests outside work.

Over coming days we will begin to see the cranes come down at the Midland Metropolitan Hospital as we move towards finishing the fabulous winter garden. Throughout next week we will be profiling in video form some of the progress made on the site as well as finalising the procurement of both our end stage contractor and our Hard Facilities Management provider.  Although the project is not a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) we will still explore all options by which to meet the ongoing maintenance and life cycle of the new hospital so that the fantastic state it will be in on opening can be sustained for the decades to come.

I am aware that many colleagues continue to help us to prepare for whatever version of EU exit lies ahead and I linked here with this message is our first weekly bulletin providing information in the countdown to the end of the month. As I explained last week our assessed readiness is strong. We should be acting together to reassure our patients that there is no need to be concerned about medicine shortages in April. Of course, if you do have concerns please raise them with me directly.

Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 8 March 2019

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