Need to know
For #TeamEEAST Last updated: 20 April 2024 at 00:53
The latest We Are EEAST Briefing and Executive Q & A comes from Marcus Bailey, Chief Operating Officer, and Bob Champion, Interim Director of Workforce.
Hi, a very good afternoon everybody, welcome to the weekly Exec Q&A. I’m Marcus Bailey, Chief Operating Officer, and I’m joined by Bob Champion, Director or Workforce as well.
We’ll give colleagues a minute to join us then if you’ve got questions please then put them in the chat box function, and we’ve had one of those questions, or a question sent in beforehand that I’ll read out and talk through as well. So, thank you for sending in advance. It is helpful if they come in in advance, only just to make sure that we can try and answer them on the day as opposed to follow up afterwards, so we try and keep it as real and as live as we’re able to as well.
So, I think that’s us at one minute passed four, so as I said, look welcome, thank you, I appreciate you taking the time out to come and join us for these sessions as well. As with all of the kind of formats, we’re just going to give a couple of key headlines, key updates, and then we’re going to give you those opportunity to ask myself or Bob any questions that you would like to as well.
So, without further ado, I’m going to hand over initially to Bob before we come back to me just for some bits to talk through, so thanks a lot, Bob over to you.
Thanks Marcus, I’ll just pick up on some of the people issues to start of with, and that over the summer you’ll start to hear about our programme for a longer-term improvement plan which we’re going to be calling Fit For the Future. The aim of this plan is to properly address the issues that our staff and our regulators raised over the last couple of years, with many of these issues going back a lot further.
I don’t want to go into the details just now, but instead I want to take a minute to say that these plans will make a big difference and change can happen. Since our full CQC inspection in 2019, we’ve actually made significant progress on a range of serious issues. We’ve improved safeguarding and mandatory training, we’ve improved our improvement methodologies and processes, and our retention speaks for itself in our turnover has reduced significantly. Our response times to patients has also improved and you can read more on our progress in the article that has been published on Need to Know.
By working together, we can make a real difference, and our latest Pulse Survey results, which we’ve shared widely now, show very small but perceptible and important improvements in tackling poor behaviour in particular. We will continue to do our best to plan and make our plans for the future relevant to you and our patients, and that is how we will take everyone together forwards in partnership with yourselves.
And, for my last part in relation to our people is in support of wellbeing in particular, relevant to colleagues and colleagues with disabilities in particular. We’ve recently launched our Stronger Than You Think programme, and that was publicised within Need to Know. It’s intended to help staff get the most out of the programme and there is an online diagnostic tool that people can access to provide a personalised analysis of your resilience and relative strengths and development areas. Again, please look on Need to Know for that information.
And now I’ll hand over to Marcus for the performance and progress updates, thank you.
Thanks Bob for that. So, just a couple of bits to touch on. Look, I said last week and I’ll say it again, the relentless nature of the activity at the moment, every part of the health sector, us absolutely feeling it every hour of every day, and also across all of the ambulance sector, really seeing that massive, massive increase.
So, we are having to take a couple of immediate actions. So, we have approved, in the first part of the pressure, we have approved support for AOC, increasing our call handling numbers, and doing that rapidly and urgently to assist in terms of wellbeing and response to patients.
The next bit is rapid work through our PAS team to increase the amount of private ambulance services that we’re able to bring onboard in terms of ad hoc fashion to assist and buy us some of that immediate relief when it comes to assistance.
The other bit coming behind that is our ability to bring forward some of our recruitment activity, particularly in terms of graduates and those who are due to qualify this summer as well, so being very close and what opportunities.
Questions answered
Q1 - When will intubation be reintroduced, so that Paramedics can give their patients the "Gold Standard" in airway management?
Q2 - Does Wellbeing cover Health and Safety at Work assessments?
Q3 - Is there an update on ePCR and when it will be rolled out Trust wide please?
Published 28th June 2021