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Are we focused on patients?
In my last blog I talked about one of our core values – respect – and what it means for us as colleagues. Treating each other with respect even as the pressure grows over winter is vital for our patients because happy staff provide the best care.
This week I want to talk about our principal value ‘focused on patients’ which drives the culture of our Trust as a caring organisation. This value is vitally important to us as we grapple with the competing needs of many different patients. This year we are doing one very simple thing that will help all of us to stay focused on this value. We are launching the new campaign “Go Green this Winter” which means we are committing to make every day ‘green’ for our patients.
A green day for a patient is one where we are taking action to advance their care and helping them get out of hospital, back to their home. This might be ordering tests, completing scans, starting medication or making plans for out of hospital care after discharge. A red day does none of those things and is a day that a patient spends in our hospital with nothing happening to them.
The reality is that hospitals are dangerous places and a day spent waiting in a hospital bed is a risk to our patients. Infections, immobility and the confusion of an unfamiliar environment can all set a patient back and cause them harm. We take every step we can to minimise these risks, but still, the shorter the stay the better for physical recovery.
For a very human reason as well, we should all see every red day as a failure. Many of the people in our beds are within the last 1,000 days of their life. How many of us, at this point in our lives, would want to spend some of those days in hospital for no reason? A red day is not only a waste of our resources, it is also a waste of life. If we say we are focussed on patients, then we need to show it by making sure that our patients’ stay in our hospital, positive though the experience may be, is a short as possible.
Wards F9, F10 and G4 have been the first to start working on Go Green this Winter by beginning to implement the SAFER patient flow bundle. This sets out the steps that senior clinical decision makers and other staff should be taking to make days green for their patients. Early morning board rounds first thing, followed by huddles in the afternoon are opportunities to get the whole ward team focussed on patient flow over the course of one day. Other wards are preparing to take this on over the coming weeks and all wards should now be making plans to join them.
I know we can make huge strides forward to go from red to green this winter and I am hugely grateful for the work that our medical director Nick Jenkins is doing in this area as chair of our flow action group. I would also like to thank Lesley Standring and Marie Marfleet for leading our Go Green this Winter campaign, in collaboration with Sandie Robinson, associate director of redesign at West Suffolk CCG.
Please do everything you can to support their efforts and focus on giving days back to our patients to spend at home again this winter.
With best wishes,
Steve Dunn, chief executive
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