We Are EEAST Briefing 11th March 2021

 

This We Are EEAST Briefing comes from Dr Tom Davis, Acting Chief Executive and Kevin Smith, Director of Finance.

Many of you may have already seen, and those of you that haven’t I’m sure will go looking for them, the national staff survey results which have been published today, and as a board we reviewed them yesterday. Our results are poor, and put the Trust at the bottom, or near the bottom of the whole of the NHS. So, our staff have, again, made their views very clear, and the board is absolutely committed to making change and responding to these.

These results reinforce findings of the CQC inspection report last September, and our subsequent staff harassment survey held at the same time as the national staff survey in October last year. So as we detailed previously, there is work already undergoing to address these concerns, and this will continue.

We have seen progress over the last six months, we’ve encouraged staff to speak up and speak out about poor behaviour, we’ve introduced a major program of cultural change, and we’ve modernised our outdated policies and processes with regards to safeguarding and HR for example.

We’ve seen many more staff raising issues through our Freedom to Speak Up Guardian, we’re recruiting more capacity into our Freedom to Speak Up resource. We’ve seen staff raising issues through union reps, and have improved, and continue to work with our union reps, on improving how we can address, collectively, those issues. And we’ve seen staff raising issues through their managers, through these engagement sessions, and directly to senior leaders.

We’ve increased the capacity, as I said, in Freedom to Speak to Speak Up, but we’ve also increased capacity in our culture work, in our organisational development work, and managers are getting additional training and development alongside this. We’re monitoring progress closely in a range of ways, and whilst I think there is early signs of progress, we know that we will have to wait for future surveys in order to see these signs turning the dial on these survey results.

I am confident that we are making a difference, and we’re making a difference in specific examples for individuals, and over time I hope this will then convert in to making a difference for the majority.

So, as I pass over to Kevin for some further message, I think it’s key that we acknowledge that, again, the staff survey is poor, but the results are reinforcing the work from the CQC and our staff harassment survey, but that we have put a lot of resource and actions in place since then, and we are starting to see the early signs of progress.

So, I’ll pass over to Kevin, and please do post your questions in the Q&A box, thanks Kevin.

Thank you Tom, good afternoon all, hopefully you’re all keeping well. One of the things that I wanted to update on was our performance, that whilst patient care is obviously our priority, performance is a part measure of that. I just wanted to highlight that we do continue to perform well.

Our latest stats on that are in a board paper, but we know that’s not necessarily the easiest format for people to access, so we’ve developed a new infographic which is on Need to Know currently for you to be able to see what we’re doing and how we’re doing, and we’ll also be sharing that with the public and stakeholders.

I think it’s fair to say over the last few weeks we’ve met all of the performance standards on a number of days, and where we don’t, we’ve been very close, and I think that is a considerable step forward from what many of you would know as our historic position.

Another good news story is that we know that over 90% of you have received the first covid vaccination, and we’ve actually kicked of the second round of vaccinations. So, please make sure you book that in as soon as you can. 90% obviously still means that there’s some people to go, but we know some people just won’t be able to have it, so I think that’s a fantastic performance and we know that our level of vaccination uptake has been higher than many organisations. So, we’re really pleased that that is happening, and thank you to everyone involved in that and you yourselves for putting yourselves forward.

We’ve also continued to make good progress on our CQC related improvement plan, which includes mainly the actions that Tom was referring to.

Published 15th March 2021