Author: Trust Director

Andrew McMenemy’s blog

Flu Vaccination

The start of the influenza season is fast approaching and we will be launching the Trust campaign to vaccinate staff on 1^st October 2019. The first day of the campaign will be marked with our launch event taking place in the Health Hub at the main entrance. This will be followed by a number of events throughout the period of the campaign. The success in recent years has been down to having excellent collaboration and involvement with peer vaccinators across all departments.

We are still looking for peer vaccinators to cover every department in the Trust. As a peer vaccinator you will be provided with all the materials needed to run a successful campaign in your area. If staff in your area, or you yourself, are interested in becoming a peer vaccinator they can contact Frankii Tibbetts, HR project co-ordinator at Francesca.tibbetts@nhs.net .

Peer vaccinators are only required to vaccinate in their area but have the opportunity to offer to vaccinate any passing staff who want the jab!

Essential face-to-face training is available from 16^th-30^th September, Monday to Friday at 3pm, 3.5pm, 4.30pm or 4.15pm in the staff health & wellbeing eepartment, to book please call ext. 2958.

Staff Survey

We are pleased to announce that the 2019 Staff Survey will be launched on 8^th October 2019.

Over the last 12 months, we have been working hard on making changes as a result of the feedback we received in last year’s staff survey. The main focus was around behaviours, including feedback relating to bullying and harassment. This led to the recent launch of the Behaviour Framework which outlines acceptable and unacceptable behaviours. We have also reviewed the way you report bullying and harassment issues and are working to make this process more accessible, informative and effective.

Other improvements have included: launching the three R’s (Rest, Rehydrate and Refuel), the community break campaign, going smoke free, opening a secure bike shelter for staff, extending the gym opening hours, introducing yoga classes, free health checks and the launch of the manager essential training in September 2019.

There is much more work to be done, however it is only made possible with your feedback!

It’s great that so many NHS staff take part in this survey. It only takes a few minutes and your feedback is very important.

Responses to this survey are strictly confidential. No one from where you work will see your completed survey or be able to identify individual responses. The survey is being run by Picker on behalf of our organisation.

Dudley People Plan

The Dudley People continues to be launched throughout the Trust and I and my team will be going to department meetings to discuss the plan alongside the new Behavioural Framework. Please follow the link to see and share both the People Plan and the Behavioural framework.

If you and your team would like to discuss the plan or framework further then please contact my PA Laura Round at laura.round1@nhs.net and she will arrange for me or my team to meet your team. 

Patient Safety Week

The World Health Organisation is holding the very first World Patient Safety Day on 17^th September 2019 to raise awareness of patient safety and urge people to show their commitment to making healthcare safer. We are supporting the campaign with a whole week of activities and we want everyone to get involved.

We will be lighting up Russells Hall Hospital orange as a really visual way to raise awareness. We will be asking patients what patient safety means to them and launching our new system for capturing positive learning.

Staff are encouraged to come along to the GREATix launch at the Grand Round on Thursday 19^th September 2019 at 12.30pm. We are asking staff to create patient safety awareness displays in their area which will be judged by patient safety lead Dr Nicky Calthorpe, chief nurse Mary Sexton and medical director Julian Hobbs.

It’s important that we have an open and transparent culture where we encourage blame free reporting and learning from errors. After all, keeping patients safe is paramount to everything we do

Mike Wood MP Visit

Dudley South MP Mike Wood is supporting our campaign to raise awareness of sepsis symptoms and prevention. He is joining the sepsis team at the Health Hub at Russells Hall Hospital tomorrow 13^th September which is World Sepsis Day. Everyone is welcome at the Health Hub – they will be there until 4pm.  Mike is also volunteering at the hospital next Tuesday, 17^th September.

 

Tom Jackson’s blog

The onset of a new school year or football season is often a time when we look to refresh with a renewed sense of positivity and hope.  It is also the time in the annual NHS financial calendar when the finances for the current year start to become clearer and planning starts for the new financial year beginning in April 2020.

We are a very large organisation and we spend over £1m per day.  As you will be aware, we are continuing to push to improve efficiency throughout the Trust with a wide range of measures and initiatives with a fair degree of success.  The way the national financial framework works in this current year means we will need to make further savings if we are to access our fair share of what is called the ‘Provider Sustainability Fund’.

By being more efficient we have been able to reallocate funding to improve the services we deliver and we are continuing to do so. Delivery of financial plans is challenging for many trusts across the country and locally.  As well as delivery of in year plans, there is a national expectation that we will develop future plans in a more collaborative way with partners across the Black Country through a national network of Integrated Care Systems.  We will be looking forward to continue working with partners to identify any further opportunities for improvement.

 

 

What a fantastic December day it was when we heard that our bid to redesign ED was successful.

The government has announced that our bid for £20.3 million to radically redesign our Accident and Emergency Department has been successful.

Father Christmas had arrived early!

Following the development of the Emergency Treatment Centre area in 2017, we’d always planned to follow this with a second phase that would look at the rest of the ED areas. When the invite to bid came along it was an opportunity not to be missed.

After submitting a bid in July 2018 we waited nervously for news. There were so many things we wanted to improve for patients and staff. The current layout and design of our ED just doesn’t support patient flow. It’s no longer big enough for the numbers coming through and we don’t have enough resus bays. Its disjointed and compartmentalised areas contribute significantly to delays in being seen, poor patient experience and inefficient use of staff resources.

We all desperately wanted the opportunity to redesign and believed Dudley deserved that opportunity.

The monies are ‘not in the bank’ yet but with specialist advice to support us we’re storming ahead with the development of the business case to secure funds to:

• substantially refurbish and reconfigure the existing Emergency Department to provide expanded and fit for purpose resuscitation facilities;
• provide a fit for purpose larger majors unit, an improved paediatrics unit, and a new main waiting area and reception for ambulatory care through a significant internal remodel to the existing ED footprint and new build extension to the front of the existing department if required;
• improve ambulance triage / handover area;
• provide new staff facilities including offices, staff changing facilities, which will have been dislodged by improvement and increase in clinical spaces by the first two bullet points above;
• provide dedicated diagnostic facilities including a CT scanner and ultrasound facilities;
• include a frailty unit within the ED which will take direct admissions from ambulances for some of our most vulnerable patients;
• provide a dedicated area to support patients with mental health needs;
• add a pharmacy dispensary facility to include dispensary, controlled drug dispensing, over the counter advice and sales, counselling area and waiting area and
• improve the bereavement suite.

Engagement events have kicked off with over 50 staff attending one of the drop in sessions that have taken place so far, contributing their niggles and ideas for improving the area. Thank you to everyone who has ‘dropped in’. All of your contributions will be considered for the final design and where they’re not we’ll feedback with why not.

If you haven’t ‘dropped in’ yet there is a further session on 5^th September in the ED Seminar Room between 1pm & 4pm. Please make the effort to drop in anytime between these hours, your contributions are valuable.

                

And don’t think we’ve forgotten to talk to our patients – we’re working with our patient experience team to ask patients what they think and how they think we can improve their experience at a dedicated patient engagement session.

We’re at the very early stage of the process with what’s called the OBC (Outline Business Case) due to be reviewed by Trust Board in Feb 2020 so keep your eye on the Hub for more updates.

If you’ve got any queries or ideas you’d like to share, please pass them to Juliegardiner@nhs.net

Summer holidays are in full swing and many of you will be taking a well-earned break with friends, family or just some time away for yourself. We are all supporting this, by covering the temporary absence of colleagues so that everyone gets their break, without impacting the service and care we provide to the public. This shows our commitment to team work at the most basic level of compassion, responsibility and resilience. This is the NHS!

Whilst reflecting on what I would write for this blog, my thoughts drifted to my own holiday in June, when I chose to cycle unsupported over the Pyrenees mountains with two of my very closest friends. One friend, a critical care specialist at a UK air ambulance, the other a Director of HR at a large insurance group. The trip involved cycling to Portsmouth, getting a ferry to Bilbao in northern Spain and then aiming to cycling to Toulouse in France….over some big mountains, with a small tent for accommodation.

On day five of the two-week trip, my bike blew over in a gust of wind. The gears snapped off. Undeterred, I decided to try and remove the gears and make the bike single speed. Thankfully this didn’t work – as climbing over a major mountain range on basically a butcher’s bike was pretty intimidating! With only my pride dented, I pushed my bike into town the next day and met my comrades at the first café they had found, to formulate a plan. The critical care specialist triaged quickly, and decided that aircraft repatriation to the UK was all that could be offered to seek a full repair – holiday over. Ever the solution focused optimist (and Pharmacist) I quickly realised that there were no bike shops for miles – so I began a futile supply-chain, delivery exercise to source the part online. The HR guy bridged the gap by looking for a practical people solution. After a second coffee, he’d encouraged us to go to a Tourist Information office. Shortly afterwards, I was getting a train back to a coastal city – the wrong direction, but the right call. After spending the afternoon trying bike shops, eventually my explanation of our team goal – inspired a very kind (yet enterprising) shop owner to take the part I needed off a brand new bike in his show room and relieve me of a handful of Euros. The team was back in business! We completed our mission, albeit on a slightly revised schedule – which I would call an ‘adventure’.

I can anticipate the ‘get to the point’ that your thinking (or shouting) at the screen right now. My point is; that all teams require a mix of individually mastered skills, the freedom to make decisions around shared values and most importantly a common purpose and vision. This is commonly known as “motivation”. A strong vision can also inspire others to join in support. Celebrating different points of view and understanding the human factors is vital. Realising that in certain situations, personally you may not have the answer and understanding that in joining forces as a team behind one goal – we are better. This is how the best outcomes are secured.

Striving for our shared vision to be trusted to provide safe, caring and effective services, because people matter by living the Trust values of Care, Respect, Responsibility means we will Care Better Every Day.

Back to the Floor

 Last week I was very privileged to join the fantastic OPAT / Community IV team for a morning chemotherapy line care clinic. Quite quickly my clinical competencies were put to the test with a thermometer! As an oncology clinician, it was fantastic to see the delivery of high quality, joined-up care that our community teams provide. I was struck by the obvious impact this service had on patients and their families, the strong supportive relationships that had formed with the nurse team really made the difference. Thank you for hosting me!

As promised colleagues – I put a filter on it!

The back to the floor approach continues in the Trust as senior nurses will have protected time each week to bring their wealth of experience and leadership into direct patient care at the front line. 

Dudley Improvement Practice

I know I am not the only member of staff that is excited about the next Dudley Improvement Practice event on Ward C3 this week. The event will run from the 8^th to the 13^th of August with the first couple of days off site and the remainder making improvements in real-time on the ward. Expect to witness Peter Lowe’s improvement tool kit in action! It will be great to see the evidence of this teamwork in the weeks to come.

Patient Safety Launch – GREATix

As I mentioned earlier the power of understanding human factors is vital to supporting our patient Safety Strategy. Learning from excellence and sharing best practice as a Trust wide team is the key to driving quality. The Trust has launched GREATix, a positive learning system with more details on the Hub. Use GREATix to highlight a team, individual or pathway that is helping us provide better patient care.

A launch event will be taking place on Wednesday 21^st August from 2 – 4 pm in the CEC where you can find out more. Everyone is welcome.

Gloucester Visit

Finally, this Wednesday the clinicians and the Digital Trust team will be hosting a team from Gloucestershire Royal Hospital looking specifically at delivering eObs, eSepsis, ePhlebotomy and order comms at their Trust using Sunrise. The team from Gloucestershire are at the very beginning of their digital journey, with a huge amount of challenge and opportunity laid out before them. It is fantastic to have a number of nearby Trusts taking on Sunrise recently, so that we can all benefit from collaborative working and share learning.

 

 

Clinical Summit

The Clinical Summit was held on Friday, 5th July 2019.  This was very successful with lots of ideas being shared and useful discussion. Professor Stephen Powis, national medical director, joined us and gave a talk on the national picture. The King’s Fund gave a presentation on transformation and Dr Chris Turner gave a presentation on Civility Saves Lives (www.civilitysaveslives.com).

There will be another Clinical Summit taking place on 22^nd November 2019.  This event will be open to all.  Details of how to book a place will be provided along with the proposed agenda in early September.

Health Economy Workshop 18^th July

We had a Health Economy Workshop on 18^th July.  This was facilitated by The King’s Fund and was attended by more than 50 clinicians from across the borough.  The aim of the workshop was to agree some practical steps towards integration.  There was some very useful discussion and a follow up meeting planned for September.

Patient Safety

I was pleased to be able to get along to the clinical audit meeting. The quality of the presentations was to a very high standard and focused on some of the negative patient safety events we have had over the last 12 months.

There is certainly room for us to strengthen some of the process we have in place and particular attention has been turned to the cardiac and neurosurgical pathways. We will keep you updated as this work progresses, moving our focus away from image transfer to the whole process of care.

This fits in very well with our drive to become an organisation which is adopted a continuous improvement philosophy “Better Care Every Day” and also do one focused on patient safety. We are procuring a new clinical audit system which will tie together governance and NICE guidance.

We have also recently launched GREATix in the Trust.

As a Trust we strive to ensure that our patients receive excellent care. However, by focusing on the rarer occasions when something goes wrong, we are missing the opportunity to learn from what goes well. Positive learning or learning from excellence is when we look at what happened in an episode of care when an individual or team went “above and beyond” what is expected of them or there was a particularly good outcome and transfer the learning from those events to other settings.

The aim of the GREATix system is to identify, appreciate, study and learn from episodes of excellence. This has the dual benefit of improving patient care and boosting staff morale by recognising when people have given that bit extra to ensure our patients are receiving the best care we can provide at The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust.

Let someone know about something they did that you appreciated, when a team worked particularly well or when a pathway worked well by submitting a GREATix.   If you want more information, please check out the information that can be found on the hub.  (https://greatix.dgft.nhs.uk)

New Policies

There are a few updated policies on the Hub these include the Senior Medics Annual Leave Policy. As part of this policy, there is a new Professional Leave form.  If you require a copy of the new form, please contact my PA, Vickie Farmer, who will be able to forward it to you.

Visit to the House of Lords

The Trust’s senior clinical leaders team had the opportunity to visit the House of Lords on 4^th June.  We listened with interest to Baroness Harding’s discussion around the workforce plan and the ongoing pensions issue. Baroness Harding has been invited to join us as a speaker at our next Clinical Summit in November.

Speaker at a National Conference

I have been invited to be a speaker at a national conference on Investigation and Learning from Deaths in NHS Trusts in November. Topics for discussion include learning from deaths, learning with and involving families when an incident occurs and learning from the lived experience, the role of the medical examiner, mortality governance and monitoring.

Congratulations

Mr Mushtaq Ahmed, Dr Mike Healy and Dr Elizabeth Rees have been appointed as chief of service for surgery, medicine and clinical support services respectively.

Mr Babar Elahi has been appointed clinical director for trauma & orthopaedics and specialist surgery. We thank him for his hard work as Guardian of Safe Working and also thank Mr Sohail Butt for his hard work and commitment as clinical director during his tenure. The directorates have grown and developed under his leadership and significant efforts he put in whilst in the role

Expressions of interest are currently being sought for the post of Guardian of Safe Working. The closing date is 12^th August 2019. If you would like to express interest in the post you can do so by sending your CV to rebecca.edwards12@nhs.net.

Hello my name is Mary and this is my very first blog…I’m always up for a challenge but I really didn’t have a clue what I would blog about or indeed what you might find interesting.

There are so many things happening in our organisation that I can hardly believe I have been here six months already. It’s fair to say it’s been both challenging and interesting and yet I have been really struck by the willingness of people to engage and focus on trying to change the conversation to improve things for our patients and staff.

Over the last few weeks I have been involved in a number of conversations about leadership and so I have been reflecting on leadership at all levels. How well do we do at engaging everyone in shared decision making in order to promote a collective leadership? Collective leadership is about being connected, recognising that people are inherently capable and can be trusted to do the right thing. Building relationships based on trust may mean we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Engaging with others is about getting to know people and how well do we really know each other strengths and do we always create opportunities to amplify the voice of others.

  

Early this week I was with my AHP colleagues talking all things strategy and professional development and we discussed how we all have to take responsibility for creating an environment that champions clinical leaders but it’s not just about clinical leaders every one of us has the ability to lead, it’s a choice. Increasing ownership and accountability means that we also have to adapt and our Dudley People Plan and supporting behavioural framework is key to helping us.
             

It is always good to have an opinion but opinions are just words we can all change  by example “deeds not words” . Small steps every day will in time make a big difference that’s collective leadership.

The Executive team spent some development time together this week looking at how we all take ownership of the NHS People Plan and bring it to life with the Dudley People Plan and how best to embed the new behaviour framework into all that we do. If anyone has any ideas on how best to deploy our new framework and people’s strategy then please let me know as we each need to own it, in order for Dudley group to be a place that has Joy in the workplace.

I have also been fortunate to take part in ‘back to the floor’ with Acute Medical Unit today. I am so grateful to Laura, the matron on AMU who took me through the fantastic achievements of the service since AMU 1 and AMU 2 merged. It was a great visit and I am excited to see what the future holds for AMU and AEC working. Thank you AMU!

The Health Fair was a great opportunity for our Members to meet staff from a range of services on Thursday, it was great to see so many services represented and there was a real buzz in the air! We used it as another opportunity to talk about our Trust Strategy and how we are performing against our six strategic objectives.

The Annual Members Meeting which followed covered a range of areas, including a presentation on End of Life Services,   The Chief Executive Overview of 2018/19, Our Quality Report for 2018/19 and the Trust Financial Accounts and Auditor’s Report for 2018/19

     

As part of our programme to visit local GP practices, I recently visited the Black Country Family Practice in Tipton with a couple of colleagues.  I had the opportunity to talk about our new Strategy with the partners and to understand what factors affect patient choice of where to receive treatment.  These visits have been very informative and identified a number of issues where we can improve our communication with primary care so they are aware of changes in our services.  A new edition of the GP Quarterly bulletin will be sent out later this month and will be published on a regular basis from now on.  If you have a message that you want to communicate to primary care, let me know so that it can be included in a future issue.

Following the trust wide communication on reducing waste and controlling costs, I think we can all agree the past two weeks have been challenging, however there is a real sense of “we are in this together” and the Trust pulling together as one which makes me even prouder to work for Dudley!

Please keep your ideas coming in for efficiencies, no idea is too small and our PMO team is following up on every single one coming in. Please do continue to send all of your ideas on what changes we could make to dgft.pmo.office@nhs.net

Alongside this, we are also involved in supporting a range of transformational projects across the Trust from  looking at understanding the reasons why patients do not attend on the day (DNA) in outpatient clinics and in theatres. We are considering what processes to put in place to reduce the number of occurrences such as extending the two way text system to more specialties so that we can enhance patient experience by giving patients more control over their appointment in good time.

I have a place in the great north run, sounds wonderful until you realise I have done NO training for the half marathon (unless you count bulking up as preparation) and it will be here in 7 weeks and the day before this tortuous race I have a family party. This starting tomorrow technique does not work!! If anyone would like to coach me please contact me.

Just to finish on a more positive note our performance for RTT for June places us the third best performing Trust, well done!

Until next time folks…

Wow what a week – the local press have surpassed themselves with coverage of the Trust this week with two front page stories two days running! The first about our ambulance handover performance and the work we are doing to improve and work with system partners and the second about our cash flow.

I just want to reiterate our message to staff that you do not need to be worried about us running out of cash – it is a risk to us but one that we are managing to ensure we don’t do that. The way we will make sure we stay in control of our destiny is through taking a tight grip on our finances for the rest of the year then we will have money to invest back into services.

The most important news this week is the publication of our latest CQC report on Friday 12^th July. I want everyone to be proud of the progress we are making and to get two outstanding ratings for services is great news and acknowledge we are on a journey to outstanding that we will achieve. I am always bowled over by the Dudley spirit I see across the Trust and we need to use this report as a spring board to make any improvements necessary in service areas to get a great inspection next time the CQC are here. We know the media will run with the negative coverage but we must remain positive and use the report as a spring board for our success to grow.

We are pleased that the hard work of our ED teams is paying off in our urgent and emergency services whose overall rating has improved to requires improvement, there remains an inadequate rating for safety but I am confident that will move next inspection. We know the work on sepsis and care of the deteriorating patient is working as shown through our SHMI data that is the lowest it has been for some time and more patients than ever are being screened and appropriately treated for sepsis. It is through the CQC process of delivering detailed weekly reports that we are probably one of the only trust in the country to have the level of detail about our ED care that means we can use evidence to improve care for our patients.

The CQC said “we saw that the Trust, emergency department leaders and staff had worked hard on their sepsis recognition and treatment throughout the year.”

We are thrilled the CQC recognised the outstanding aspects of our community end of life service which was rated good overall and received outstanding for caring. Community health services for adults also received a good overall rating. This is great recognition of the dedication and commitment to excellent patient care these teams deliver to their patients. I am confident our next inspection will see many more areas of outstanding and good practice highlighted.

Congratulations also goes to our surgery services for achieving an outstanding rating for being a caring service and are rated good overall.

Our critical care service also improved to a good rating, again recognition of the improvements made by the teams in delivering good patient care.

We are making steady progress across all of our services but we are, of course, disappointed that our diagnostic imaging services has been rated inadequate overall, and overall the Trust was inadequate for safe domain.

Our diagnostic team responded immediately to the concerns and put actions in place at the time of the inspection and are confident of our improvements. We introduced a matron to oversee quality and safety and have increased monitoring 24/7 of our inpatients waiting for imaging.

We have also conducted a comprehensive staffing review to ensure any additional posts are in the right places to support patient care and safety. We have had an external expert’s view on our staffing review and skill mix within the department. We have been successful in recruiting specialist MI and CT radiographers who are now in post and additional radiographers will be in post by September. We are continuing to invest in radiology staffing.

The inadequate rating for diagnostics also means Corbett OPD centre will be rated inadequate overall too and that is so sad for all staff involved because we know just how hard everyone works across the trust and the report does not do that justice.

Myself and the Board of Directors want to thank you all for working so hard to deliver improved services despite the day-to-day challenges to the Trust. They are confident we will continue to address issues raised by CQC and go on to make Dudley outstanding.

On that note we must also thank everyone who was recognised through our committed to excellence awards this year where we celebrated some excellent work throughout the trust. Check out the Trust for all the award winners but here are just a flavour.

It is great to be writing the
directors blog this week as I reflect on the last two years I have been here. We have had our challenges and ups and downs
through inspections and ratings and staff feeling low morale and
increased pressure. However what does come out loud and clear in Dudley is the quality of our staff and their amazing resilience.

We still have some way to go with our regulators to assure them that we are providing the very best care we can because I know we are. There are examples of outstanding practice across the trust, end of life care, surgery referral to treatment times are amongst the best in the country, as are many of our outcomes for these patients, stroke service continue to outperform their peers and we have world leading GI and vascular services.

I want the world to know how good Dudley is and we will do everything in our power to make sure people hear our stories of success, all too often this last two years the media have chosen to focus on the negative and we now need to show them the good stuff and there is a lot of it!

It was timely that the NHS interim people plan was launched recently and I hope many of you will have had a read because it chimes entirely with what staff have told us they want from our Trust. Through your responses to the national staff survey, our staff friends and family test and of course the hugely popular ‘make it happen’ events we have had feedback from thousands of staff about what it’s like to work here and what we can improve. The key themes coming out loud and clear are:-

• Communication
• Behaviours
• Development opportunities

We have a Dudley People Plan which has been formed from the feedback you have given us and is aligned to the national NHS Interim People Plan.

The main aims of the Dudley People Plan will be:

• A workforce for now and the future: making Dudley the place people want to be and stay
• A caring, kind and compassionate place: we will support people to have joy in work and to treat each other with compassion and kindness
• Equality, fairness and inclusion: we will have an inclusive culture where we all believe in and live by our Trust values
• Improvement and development culture: we will create a place that supports you becoming what you want to be and where there are opportunities for development and improvement for everyone.
• Use technology to innovate : we will create a place that embraces technology to support different ways of working.

One of the first things we will be doing is to launch a behaviour framework for everyone that will support us all in living our values of care, respect and responsibility and showing kindness for our colleagues. There will be more on this at my team brief next week so make sure you pop along.

Making sure all our people feel they have a positive experience at work engaged is my number one priority, people being comfortable to share good news and concerns is vital to making Dudley a great place to work. I am passionate about every member of staff having a voice and being able to influence and everyone’s feedback is so important to delivering our People Plan.

Which brings me onto the very exciting Committed to Excellence awards. The Oscars style event takes place next Friday 5^th July and I want to say congratulations to everyone who was nominated and good luck to all our finalists. The standard of nominations this year was incredible and made the judging panel’s job a very difficult one. Of course I’d love to give everyone an award as you are all so deserving.

Engagement being crucial to delivering excellent services make sure you pop along to the Clinical Summit happening on the 5^th July, also at the Copthorne Hotel in Brierley Hill where we will be hearing from guest speakers Professor Stephen Powis, NHS Medical Director, the Kinds Fund and Dr Chris Turner on Civility saves lives. To register contact Becky Edwards at Rebecca.edwards12@nhs.net

Then on the 18^th July we have an MCP clinical event open to all to help share, shape and plan the future of the MCP supported by the Kings Fund. The afternoon will provide an opportunity to discuss the priorities for clinical care, the opportunities for enabling clinical integration and to agree some practical next steps for pursuing a shared vision. Contact  Rebecca.edwards12@nhs.net if you’d like to attend.

It’s all about the People!

The interim People Plan for the NHS was recently published following on from the NHS Long Term Plan, published in January 2019. The Interim People Plan sets out the NHS vision for people who work in the NHS to enable us all to deliver the Long term Plan. The Plan focuses on the following main priorities:

• Make the NHS the best place to work;
• Improve our Leadership Culture;
• Prioritise urgent action on nursing shortages;
• Develop a workforce to deliver 21^st century care;
• Develop a new operating model for workforce.

In developing our own Dudley People Plan, aligned to the national interim Plan, we will be asking staff what they think this Trust should be focusing on to support our workforce. Details will be provided shortly of how you can get involved in shaping the future for staff at Dudley Group.

The Interim People Plan can be found at the following link,

https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/publication/interim-nhs-people-plan/

 

Staff Awards

Nominations have closed and shortlisting has taken place for the Committed to Excellence Awards. The ‘Oscar’ style awards night is taking place on 5^th July with finalists invited to attend. There was huge interest this year with over 600 really fantastic nominations demonstrating a workforce that cares and demonstrates innovation. We should all be very proud of the achievements of our amazing staff.

The Healthcare Heroes Awards for June 2019 have been very well received with the Team Award being presented to the Cardiac Assessment Unit and the individual award being provided to Darshan Pandit on MHDU. Well done and congratulations on your well deserved recognition.

In addition to our own Committed to Excellence we are extremely proud that our Cardiac Assessment Unit has been shortlisted for a Nursing Times Award so good luck to all the team – bring back that award!

It has been great to see people engaging with each other in so many positive ways. I have witnessed first hand the joy it brings to people when they have been ‘mugged’ so if you haven’t tried it give it a whirl in your area and see the kindness spread. And by the way it’s not the horrible sort of mugging!

 

Annual Members Meeting

 The Annual Members Meeting will be held on 18th July 2019 at 4pm in the Clinical education centre. The meeting provides an opportunity for staff and members of the local community to learn more about the Trust and how it has performed in the last year. We are looking forward to demonstrating some of our successes alongside some of the challenges. You are all very welcome to attend and I know some services are showcasing at the event.

 

Official Opening of Paediatric Emergency Department

 The official opening of our Paediatric Emergency Department will take place on Friday 21^st June 2019. The unit has been operational for a few months now and the feedback from both staff and patients has been extremely positive. The environment is much more spacious and provides the clinical setting that our patients and staff deserve. A big thank you to all those who helped make this change happen.

 

Finally- Live Chat with the chief executive

 On Friday 21^st June between 12-1pm there is an opportunity for staff to ask Diane Wake, chief executive any question in her regular live chat. She will be ready and waiting for your questions so please ask away on any topic. This is a great opportunity to communicate directly with Diane and she will respond immediately and address your questions and any concerns.