Improving Together - CEO Caroline Donovan's Blog - 31 March
Hello everyone,
I’m back following a period of annual leave, which was much needed and a chance to reflect and recharge. I know many of you have taken leave in March, and I hope you feel refreshed returning to work. Whilst I kept in touch a little, I am very grateful to Cath Byford who stepped up to cover me whilst I was off – it was a busy time!
I want to take a moment to reflect on the NHS picture nationally. On 13 March the Government announced reform representing some of the most significant reshaping of the NHS nationally in a decade. The changes include the abolition of NHS England and plans to subsume its duties within the Department for Health and Social Care.
Integrated care boards have been told they must reduce their running costs by 50% later this year. The Government has also indicated that provider Trusts will be required to reduce their corporate costs, although on a smaller scale. We are progressing with our plans to review how our corporate services function and we’ll share more information about this work in due course. In common with all other Trusts, we await further clarity from the Government. We appreciate this will be a challenging period, and our thoughts are with our colleagues across the NHS and beyond.
You will of course know that the Care Quality Commission (CQC) joined us just over a week ago for a clinical services inspection of our Trust. Some of you will have had the opportunity to speak to the inspectors and share detail of the progress we are making to provide safer, kinder and better services to those in need. A big thank you to everyone for keeping calm and speaking confidently to the CQC about the improvements you have made and plan to make as well as describing the direction of travel with our new locality structure. The feedback from the inspectors I have spoken to has been positive, importantly where there were issues picked up, we have responded quickly to address. We have also provided information for over 100 data requests to support their inspection, which is usual.
I want to share my appreciation to you and to others who supported the process. Thank you so much – whilst we know we have much more to do, it was a real opportunity to showcase the progress we’ve made since the last time we were inspected. The inspectors particularly commented on how welcome they were made in every area they visited, and how responsive we were to everything they asked for.
I am very grateful to Anthony Deery, Michael Lozano and Lisa Quinn for their exemplary leadership. We are also working with the CQC on the well-led inspection which will happen in May. We’ll share more information about this in the coming weeks.
I would like to thank everyone who joined our all staff briefing session on 18 March or have listened back to this. The was all about our NHS Staff Survey results, along with our Listening into Action survey results, plus emerging details about the recent substantial changes announced for the NHS. It was great to hear that over 400 of you came along to the briefing. If you missed it, please do find the time to watch it back on our intranet.
Our Trust has had challenging NHS staff survey results for many years, with this year showing a similar picture. We know we have a long way to go but we have a very clear plan in place to enable us to deliver improvements, aligned to our Trust values. We are continuing to use Listening into Action (LiA) as the approach to improve our culture. I am working with our LiA team to act upon issues raised over the next 20 weeks with our Wave 2 Pioneer Teams or as Quick Wins. I hope to see all our achievements and dedication to make NSFT safer, kinder and better result in more positive responses to future NHS staff surveys.
As part of our commitment to improving culture, I’m delighted to invite colleagues to our first Race Equity Conference taking place on Tuesday 20 May at Milsoms, Kesgrave, near Ipswich. If you were one of the 170 people who expressed an interest for this event, please re-confirm your attendance by completing the short form in the staff email before Tuesday 22 April. Work is underway to agree the programme for the day and I will keep you updated on progress in future blogs. This work will support with improving culture and inclusion, and address feedback from the NHS staff survey.
We know many of you really miss our regular all staff briefings, so we will be re-introducing these in the coming weeks, based on your feedback. Look out for more to come on this soon.
As part of our renewed commitment to partnership working and being open and transparent, Dr Faisil Sethi and Cath Byford were invited to represent the Trust at the Norfolk Health Overview Scrutiny Committee on 20 March. They provided an update to Committee members on our improvement programme against the Trust’s strategic objectives of improving health, improving care, improving culture and improving value. Councillors welcomed hearing how we continue to progress with the implementation of our improvement plan.
I am so pleased today to be able to share details of a new staff recognition scheme – our monthly TALK Awards. This new monthly awards scheme has been designed to recognise NSFT staff who embody our Trust. TALK Values:
- We are a Team
- We are Accountable
- We Learn and Improve
- We are Kind
At the end of each month, six winners will be selected – one from each of our five localities and one from corporate services. From these six winners, an overall TALK Award winner of the month will be selected, who will be invited to our next Safer, Kinder, Better Awards event taking place this December.
Open to staff, stakeholders and members of the public it’s really simple to nominate a colleague – complete this short form selecting which of our values they have demonstrated and share up to 100 words demonstrating how their behaviour exemplifies our values and what impact they have made. I look forward to sharing our first TALK Award winners with you in a future blog.
Finally, I want to introduce Nikant Ailawadi, who joins the Trust this week as Director of Patient Experience. Nikant brings over 25 years of experience leading patient experience, insight, and quality improvement across both the NHS and global organisations. Please join me in welcoming Nikant to the Trust.
Thanks again to each and every one of you.
Best wishes,
Caroline