Thursday 16th February 2023: Executive message from Tom Abell, Chief Executive

Dear colleagues,

Firstly, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on last week’s terrible news about the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. We will all have been shocked by the on-going coverage, and those colleagues with family and friends in those countries may be finding this particularly difficult. I know we will all want to offer our help – whether it is through supporting an individual colleagues or perhaps by making a donation to the appeal. You can find out more about what you can do to support here.

I thought it might be helpful this week to update you on some of the areas we are working on across the Trust as we turn our mind to the next financial year and push forward with our efforts to get our service onto a more sustainable footing.

You’ll all be aware that our response times to patients increased significantly last year, and it’s good to see that we have seen improvements over recent weeks. However it’s clear that we still have much to do – this is not new as we know we have had some of the longest response times in the country for many years, particularly for category 2 responses. 

I believe we can do better, and I hope you share this ambition for our patients and communities. Therefore, we are working on three key areas to do this:

• A new Operational Improvement Plan, which aims to address and act in those areas where we know we are inefficient or can change the way we work to improve response times. This may be challenging ourselves on response times, maximising the use of clinical triage within our control centres, through to ensuring that we have the right equipment we need at hand to cut down time.
• Working to increase our resources through our Clinical Strategy. This will involve not only focusing on recruiting and training more clinicians to work within our service, but also continuing to unlock developmental and career pathways for our people so that we can increasingly get the right specialist to the right patient first time.
• Continuing to extend our partnership working to increase our capacity to expand. We have now agreed with each of our 6 Integrated Care Systems that they will work over the next 16 weeks to create 6 Community Hubs which will bring together ambulance, community, acute and mental health resources into a single team. This team will support the extension of our Access to the Stack and one number for each ICS for Call Before You Convey.  As part of this we will also look to further expand our co-response collaborations with our blue light and military partners and further expand and support our Community First Responders.

We’ll be talking more about our work in these areas over the coming months, and it will require change and commitment from all of us and our partners. I’m confident we can do this and get ourselves into a better position for next winter.

We are bringing this work together within our wider change programme – which is brought together under Fit for the Future - as we continue to work on improving our culture, making our service more inclusive and a better place to work for all of us.

 

Industrial action

As you may be aware colleagues who are members of the GMB union have voted in favour in industrial action over the national issue of pay. We understand the strength of feeling behind the concerns that people have around this issue and will continue to work with our unions to improve everyone’s working lives here at EEAST.

 

Local Q&A briefings

This week’s local Q&A briefings will take place at 4pm on Thursday 16 February in Herts & West Essex, Norfolk and Waveney, and Support Services. Please attend and use this opportunity to ask about the latest developments for the trust and for your area.

 

Survey deadline extended

Thank you to everyone who has responded to our survey for LGBTQ colleagues and our people who have disabilities. Overall we have received a really good response. The next steps in the research offer you the opportunity to have confidential one to one discussion and/or to join a small online discussion group with McKenzie LLP the external organisation that is undertaking the research for us. We have extended the deadline for you to join these discussions until Friday 3 March to ensure that we get as many views as possible.

You are welcome to join both or either of these events, and I would like to emphasise that they are completely confidential. Click here to find out more.

 

Thank you Thursday

 

Thank you,

Tom

Published 16th February 2023