Thursday 5th January: Executive message from Kevin Smith, Director of Finance and Commissioning

Happy New Year to all of you and your families. I hope you have all had some opportunity to have time with family and friends over the Christmas period.

I want to thank you all for working throughout an exceptionally busy Christmas and New Year period – a time when the challenges facing the NHS were front page news across the nation.

As you will no doubt know, the Christmas period saw some truly difficult hospital delays, and, due in part to many of our vehicles caught up in delays outside hospitals, we declared a Business Continuity Incident on December 28^th. Many other ambulance trusts and acutes were in similar positions at this time.

This was the second time we moved to BCI status within a few days and I can only thank those who have worked through these circumstances. I am sorry for colleagues who were caught up in this. I know that our team - whether that is on ambulances, preparing our ambulances, in urgent care, in PTS, in our control rooms, our volunteers or managers on call – have continued to work through these challenges to keep our patients safe. Thank you for your support and hard work.

Last year was a difficult year across the NHS. At EEAST our focus is on continuous improvement and I hope we can see further results of this work in 2023. Initial 2023-24 operational planning guidance was published over the festive period – more detail will emerge over the next few weeks but there has been a clear recognition that ambulance capacity needs to be increased to help reduce response times, so we are hopeful we may see some further investment.

I wish you all a Happy New Year and I look forward to working with you in 2023.

Kevin Smith
Director of Finance and Commissioning

 

Important Trust News

• National Quarterly Pulse Survey
  We will soon be inviting you to take part in the first National Quarterly Pulse Survey (NQPS) of the year. Picker, who run the main National Staff Survey, will be conducting the NQPS survey for us. The survey is open to everyone and you’ll be sent an individual email with a link to complete the survey. We keep saying it, but it is really important for us to receive up to date feedback from you on how you feel things are so that we can make improvements.

 

Published 5th January 2023