Update from Anthony Marsh - 30th July 2015

I was delighted so many of you attended the clinical briefing yesterday and I hope you gained a lot from it in terms of knowledge gained and sharing ideas and experiences with colleagues. When I was on the frontline I found it extremely valuable to be able to talk about incidents I attended and I’m sure many of you feel the same; the crew room can be a great place to informally talk about what you did and the clinical decisions you made.

Over the last 18 months we have put in place the real foundations for the service – more frontline staffing, career progression pathways and training, increased ambulance cover and new fleet and equipment. We need to keep building on these foundations whilst at the same time continuing to develop our clinical focus; and the clinical briefing was another step forward in our drive to place clinical quality and patient safety at the heart of everything we do.

As I have always said, the best thing about this organisation is the people and this is also evidenced in the values you chose for EEAST. We are working on how these will be rolled out but this is an extremely important piece of work. I want everyone to know what this organisation stands for and for every member of staff to integrate the values into their daily work. Another part of this is the work we are doing on organisational development and there was an article on Need to Know earlier this week about the work that is already happening across the Trust. From developing staff in bands 1-4, to appraisals and a specific EOC survey on working relationships, this is a key area of work that will offer you better support going forward. Together, this is going to help us to positively change the culture of the organisation for the benefit of staff, volunteers and patients.

Published 30th July 2015