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A Christmas message from Steve Dunn
It’s Christmas time and once again this is a busy time of year. I’d like to thank all of our staff for your hard work all through 2016 and especially at this busy time. It feels like we never get chance to draw breath and reflect on what we are achieving.
But when you have that glass of something over Christmas and New Year, you should be proud of what you are doing for our patients and community. I sincerely appreciate how hard you work and the pride you take in your jobs.
And we have achieved a lot this year. At the beginning of the year we took over the running of community services with Norfolk Community Healthcare and Ipswich Hospital and overseen a relatively smooth transition, bringing staff and the services back into the NHS. There is much more to do to integrate our hospital services with our community teams and this has to be our future focus. Building up local teams so we can keep people in their community or at home to reduce the pressure on health and care services has to be our priority in 2017.
In March, after a challenging Winter we showed off our wares to the CQC. All of you undertook an enormous amount of preparation. We asked you to shine. And you did. To get outstanding in caring was amazing. That is why we come to work in the NHS. To care. But we can also proudly say that we are the best hospital in the East in terms of our quality and performance. And we should continue to strive to make improvements where the CQC said we could and should.
The other foundation stone we have laid is e-Care. In May we went live with the new system. It’s been a challenge. It’s not perfect and our medical secretaries are still having problems. But we went live in an amazing Dunkirk spirit way! Everyone pulled together and made it happen safely. And in the medium term e-Care will make us a safer and better hospital. Our experience underpinned our successful bid to become a Global Digital Exemplar so that we are now one of a small select group of hospitals who are getting funding to become a beacon for best practise across the NHS.
This is major achievement. Information will be the glue to bind and join-up care between us and other hospitals as well as community, primary and social care. Phase two of e-Care will begin in the New Year.
So we have a good quality foundation, good integration with community services and a good information foundation. We just need to make sure our in-year challenges don’t knock us off course. And this means ensuring that our hospital stays safe over the winter and that our hospital flows. This is our focus on ensuring that patients stay as short a time as they need to in our hospital and we avoid using expensive temporary staff and escalation areas. This is our focus on the SAFER patient flow bundle.
Thank you for all you do. Thank you if you are working over the holiday period. Thank you for being a great hospital to lead. Let’s come back after the New Year refreshed and reinvigorated to build upon a great foundation.
With best wishes
Steve Dunn
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