My first year at EEAST - Tom Abell, CEO
It is now a year since I joined EEAST and I wanted to share with you some of my reflections from the past 12 months around what we have achieved and what lies ahead of us. I will apologise in advance for what is a slightly lengthy message, but it’s been a busy period!
It goes without saying that what has stood out to me has been the sheer commitment of our people. The hard work, passion and desire from all of you to improve the Trust and the service we provide to our communities shines through and I hope it is something that you are as proud of as I am.
We know that our Trust has a long journey of improvement ahead. I’ve always been clear that it will take at least 3 to 5 years to make the changes and improvements we all want to see. However, I am pleased that we have been able to make substantial progress in many areas, this includes improving our culture. Over the past year we have:
- Resolved over 91% of our long-standing legacy employee relations cases.
- Seen a reduction in the number of people experiencing bullying and harassment, and a 71% drop in the number of people suffering sexual harassment.
- Seen three quarters of us completing values training to ensure that our behaviour is civil and respectful.
- Celebrated the long service and achievements of over 500 colleagues, along with awarding Jubilee medals and coins to everyone.
- Taken steps to ensure we take firm and proportionate action where people do not act in line with our values and expected standards of behaviour.
- Seen a recognition from the CQC that there has been a ‘marked improvement’ in a number of the areas of concern which they raised in previous reports – although clearly still with much more to do.
Equally, over the past year, we have seen the most extensive period of pressure on ambulance services that has ever been experienced and this remains the case today, but we have taken a number of steps to tackle the impact that this has on you and our patients waiting within the community. The measures included:
- Over 40 types of additional support for physical and mental health and removing the cap on mental health and physiotherapy support.
- Introducing welfare wagons and trolleys across the Trust, which will continue for the foreseeable future.
- Launching our new end of shift protocols, and hospital cohorting arrangements which we are continuing to develop to try and help get everyone home on time more frequently.
- Recognising the importance of the Hospital Ambulance Liaison Officer (HALO) role and making these permanent appointments to support our people at hospital and to continue to develop relationships with our hospitals.
However, you know as well as me, that to respond to these new levels of demand we are going to have to change the way we work to better manage the pressure on our service and to ensure that all our partners play their part in rising to the needs of our communities. However, on this we have also to start to take action:
- We expanded the role of advanced paramedics in our control rooms to support triage and will be rolling out a significant expansion in their role, both in control and on the road in advance of winter.
- We began the process of passing appropriate calls and patients in a number of our sectors to partner services, where they can meet patients needs, including referring back to 111 services where appropriate. We are now in the process of scaling this up in preparation for winter.
- We introduced access to silver frailty lines and consultant connect on a trial basis to assess the effectiveness of these services in supporting triage and frontline decision making.
- We continued to build on our partnerships with Fire and Rescue services across our region to further expand our co-response arrangements.
- We secured investment into our Community First Responder groups, with the introduction of new cars and equipment such as the Raizer chairs.
Clearly there have been difficulties and setbacks along the way, and we have not made as much progress in some areas where I had hoped we would. This includes the need to:
- Support our frontline managers better and to make sure they have manageable roles and the time to be able to support their teams properly.
- Continue to focus on joining up our organisation across different teams and departments so we work together more successfully.
- Create more ways to make working within our service more sustainable for our people, providing more flexibility and tackling the real risk of burnout.
I recognise that a key area for improvement is also around giving you the opportunity to develop your skills and progress your career here at EEAST, as well as making sure we are an attractive place to work. I am pleased we have taken a number of first steps to address this:
- We have worked hard to respond to the issues associated with OFSTED and findings from Health Education England (HEE) on our learning environment and have been able to restart recruitment to apprentice roles within our Trusts. Recent reports from HEE are already indicating improvement in our learning environment.
- We have welcomed a number of new colleagues to our team.
- Over 200 new frontline A&E colleagues joined our Trust since April – with a further 300 being planned this financial year.
- Over 100 new colleagues joined our control centres, with over 100 more call handlers and 13 more dispatchers planned this year.
- Over 30 new PTS colleagues joined the team, with 40 more being planned for this year.
- In addition, we now have 9 live Make Ready Hubs and a further 3 planned for next year
- We have also begun to start the process of introducing rotational roles within the Trust, this includes the recent rotational hospice role in Suffolk and with GP practices.
A big thank you to all of you who have helped make this happen. We’re not out of the woods and we still have an awful lot more to do to resolve long standing problems and rise to the challenge of new ones, but I am confident that if we continue working together as one team, we will keep making the difference that we want to see for ourselves, our colleagues and our communities.
I ask that we all work to address the challenges we face, through ensuring that the respect, dignity and compassion we show to patients is also shown to each and every one of our people. This can be as simple as thanking each other and recognising someone's efforts to do a good job. These small steps, taken repeatedly, will build the culture that we all want to work and develop within.
I hope you feel as excited as I do about the coming months and years and what we can achieve together.
Published 1st September 2022
