We Are EEAST Briefing - 11th February 2021

 

We Are EEAST Briefing from Thursday 11th February 2021, featuring Acting CEO Dr Tom Davis and Interim Director of Nursing, Clinical Quality and Improvement, Juliet Beal. 

So, I don’t need to tell people that in addition to the challenges of the pandemic and Winter, we have had the challenges of the snow and the wind this week, and again I wanted to say a big thank you to all our colleagues in the organisation, both front line and support services, who I know play a huge part in the organisations ability to maintain a response to our patients despite the adverse weather conditions.

I know that many people have given up their time outside of work time to support with 4X4 vehicles, as well as people going above and beyond to support each other and support patients in the most challenging of weather, especially the snow that has been seen across the region, and I think the East of England has seen some of the worst in the country.

What was really positive for me to read was a message that comes from Sir Simon Stevens office and his Chief Operating Officer on the daily or weekly bulletin that comes from the central NHS England, and I was really pleased to read a story about how the East of England Ambulance Service had worked with Fire and Rescue colleagues to support a patient in Suffolk. So, not only is the work being recognised by our own patients and our own regional colleagues, but we have made a positive impact and been given the appropriate recognition from the central office of NHS England. So that’s fantastic and a big thanks from me to everyone that’s participated in maintaining that response to our patients over the last week.

I think what it has also done is enable us to test some of the remote working options that we’ve had in place over the last couple of months but maybe haven’t needed to test. This has given us the ability to have confidence in those processes moving forward, so the ability to deliver care to our patients through people being at home rather than people travelling in to either to our control room or to their local stations.

So, that’s the first bit that I wanted to cover, and I’ll pass on to Juliet then hopefully be able to answer some questions as they come in. Thanks, Juliet.

That’s lovely, thank you very much Tom. As Tom said, I’m Juliet Beal and I’m the Interim Director of Nursing, Clinical Quality and Improvement. So, first of all I want to say a big thank you to you all for coming forward for vaccinations. So, we have now got 83% of all our staff and volunteer’s vaccinated, which is absolutely fantastic, and in fact East of England is one of the best vaccinators in the country, so we’re doing really well.

However, we still have some of you still left to vaccinate, some of those are people who have been off with Covid and are coming back to work and need to wait a certain period of time before they are vaccinated, and of course if that is the case for you we will be supplying vaccinations for you. We are still trying to work with our volunteer workforce to get you vaccinated so please come forward if you are in that category. And we will be continuing with the first vaccinations until about the end of March, although of course we will always ensure you can access a Covid vaccination if you need one.

We’ll then be starting from the beginning of April on doing people’s second vaccination. So, we’re just working on plans at the moment to look at that and to look how long that will take. We are hoping that because we’ve had more leading time to do this, to get it organised, that we will be able to give people a clearer timeslot and you’ll be able to organise yourselves a bit better around the vaccination slots. So, I’m hoping the program will feel like it’s not quite so frantic.

But thank you, everybody has been absolutely amazing. Thank you if you came and had a vaccine and then had a day off the next day in case you weren’t feeling well, and I actually think that very few people in the end felt really unwell and took time off for it, so thank you.

I just want to say something about the Pulse Survey. I’m sure that you’ve seen that the Pulse Survey is out. Please take some time to fill it in. I filled mine in, it only literally takes five minutes, and what it does is it gives us a really good idea and feel of how you are feeling working within the organisation, of how you are feeling about things generally. So please take that time. We are trying to work on the culture of the organisation and make sure that you are able to have your voice heard and this is one of the ways of doing that.

We know there are an awful lot of surveys around at the moment but please bear with us. Because what we are doing is we are collating all that information to work on our culture campaign. There’ll be much more information about the culture campaign coming on next month.

If I can just give you an example of the kinds of changes that we are making in the organisation. So, just ot look at my area, so for example when there is an incident and there need’s to be learning from that incident, we are gathering people around and talking to people in a really supportive way about what happened, what could have gone better, and what didn’t go so well, so that people can learn from it. And we’re having some really good feedback on examples of how we change practice and how people learn from different incidents that have happened.

So, that’s just one of the ways that we want to support people to practice really well, to do their jobs really well, and to start changing the culture in the organisation.

Finally, before I hand back to Tom, I really want to remind you of the Speak Up, Speak Out and Stop It campaign. So, if you are being bullied or harassed please speak up, if you see bullying or harassment please speak out, and if you are bullying or harassing please stop.

So, thank you very much everyone, and I’ll hand back to Tom.

Thank you Juliet, and some fantastic work by all with regards to the vaccines, and I know that the regional team are extremely proud of the work that the regional providers have done in achieving the figures that we’ve done, and we’ve absolutely been part of that, so thank you to Juliet.

So, I just wanted to continue with a bit of feedback from the work we have been doing with our regulators and the board over the last two weeks just whilst anyone feels that they have any questions that they do want to send in please do, and in the meantime I will just update you.

I think one of the messages we were very keen to share with our regulators last week in our oversight assurance group meeting is that, and this is relevant to the culture work that Juliet talked about, is that this is going to be not a quick process. Sorry, that’s really poor use of language, but we’re really clear that we do this properly.

We are turning over stones, we are looking in places that maybe the organisation should have looked at before, but these things are not going to happen overnight, and there is a lot of work and investment going into it. But I absolutely want to be clear that it’s uncomfortable that we’re doing what we need to do, but it’s absolutely the right thing that we’re doing it. The right thing to ensure that people feel safe coming in to work and working alongside each other every day.

I think the regulators have been supportive in that approach, so we have made some transactional changes since the CQC report. But now we need to move towards embedding and sustaining those changes, and that, as I said, will take time. But it’s been a really positive couple of weeks from a point of view of the regulatory oversight group meeting, and our board meetings this week, where we’ve had a private board session and a workshop, and really started to explore how we as a senior leadership team can support the organisation moving forward to embed and sustain these changes.

I will just pause as there is a question that has come in. So ‘why is there now a delay in the second vaccination? People were told the second would be around eight weeks, and when having the vaccination in other locations it’s been booked for eight weeks’. So, I will pass back to Juliet in a second, but I think this is a topic that, as I’m sure people are aware, is being discussed in the Chief Executive regional meetings. It continues to be a very fluid process, we’ve seen this week that the World Health Organisation have supported the time frames of second vaccinations, and that’s a step forward compared to where we were last week or the week before.

I think what potentially has happened is as people are being given their first vaccine, the time frame is being defined at that point in time as a certain time frame, and then things have shifted. And so the regional approach has very much not to commit to a specific time frame, but actually that we are working to the guidance, and the systems and the processes will be set up to ensure that nobody is missing their second dose when they have had the first, and aiming to give the vaccinations at the same venue to where they were given the first time round.

But maybe Juliet you probably have a much more detailed knowledge of the situation and it would be wrong of me not to pass back to her for a more comprehensive, so thank you Juliet.

Thank you Tom, so we started the vaccination program, as you know, in about the second week of January and of course if you had your vaccine in that week then you need to come much earlier. We’re aiming to vaccinate people round about the ten-week mark, but we need to get you vaccinated and offer you a vaccine before twelve weeks.

So, that’s the recommendations, we are following really carefully the recommendations from the National Immunisation Program, and Chris Martin who has been leading the program is almost in daily touch around when we are doing vaccinations and how we’re going to do it. So the program in place is nationally recognised and within the right time frames to ensure you get the best immunity possible.

Thank you.