Update from CEO Robert Morton

Robert Morton ambulance OPT

I know all our thoughts will be with our 999 colleagues in Brussels this week, and those affected by the tragic incidents. It really is emergency care at its most challenging, and can appreciate only too well what difficulties the teams over there will have faced in the last 72-hours. It is a desperately sad situation that we find ourselves in where senseless attacks like these happen.

My emails to you over the last week about the recent Executive Team proposal has generated a lot of discussion, and in some cases it seems, some confusion. I hope you will have by now had time to read my follow-up email clarifying a few points, but as per the red watermark across each page, this is a proposal released to staff side for consultation. So essentially, the Trust’s position is that everything in the document is subject to change through dialogue – including dates and actions. Until the Trust has completed discussions with UNISON, there is certainly no final position to implement.

It also appears that there has been a wider misunderstanding about the meal-break element of the proposal, in terms of when the meal-break would start. The Trust’s proposal is that the meal break, or rest period, would start within five minutes of arriving at the nearest EEAST location (after clearing from the first call that ends within the meal break window). At no stage has it ever been intended or inferred that staff should have meal breaks in vehicles or not have access to basic facilities – this is simply not the case. 

We held our latest Board meeting yesterday (23rd March), this month in Luton.  Key topics that were discussed were staff welfare and patient safety.   I want to thank those staff who attended and presented to the Board about their first hand experiences of traumatic incidents and the support they received. We have made huge steps with the rollout of TRiM thanks to the work of our colleague Martin – on your payslip this month will be a leaflet giving more details about TRiM, please take the time to read it.

Clearly this is an area we need to keep investing in and am pleased that our Health and Wellbeing Manager, Debra, is pulling this all together and looking at creating a wellbeing hub for the benefit of all colleagues.

If you couldn’t make it but want to get an idea of what was discussed, you can take a look at @EastEnglandAmb on Twitter as we tweeted live from the meeting under #EEASTlive.

Have a good week,

Robert

Published 24th March, 2016

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