Staff briefing roundup

Here’s a summary of what was covered in this week’s staff briefing…

Welcome – Rob Gerlis

Spotlight on…

Urgent Care – Redhwan Ahmed, Senior Transformation Officer

• There are a number of key mind frames we consider before a project and these include brainstorming, thinking outside the box and trying to find a solution to the problem.
•  Teamwork is vital in this area.
• One of the pieces of work we have been doing is a real time ambulance audit – the first time something like this has been attempted.
• Clinicians logged onto a WhatsApp style group via Teams, which meant they were recording incidents as they happened rather than afterwards.
• This sort of work helps stakeholders and provides evidence for other workstreams. Since we did ours, other CCGs have also carried out their own.
• Michelle Bullman – this piece of work was very unique and different and was a real eye opener about the day-to-day pressures and how we could help with this.
• In particular, we are now looking at how crews can have better access to step up bed capacity.

Frailty End of life and care homes – Cathy Mansfield, Senior Transformation Manager

• Within west Essex, of our 320,000 population, one per cent is calssed as being ‘end of life’ and how we explain this is that if you “Wouldn’t be surprised” if someone dies within the next year then they are within this category.
• As part of the wider ICS we have been working on triage systems and providing care integration and worked with EPUT to provide a system with a code, identifying a potential end of life patient where their phone number is used to do this. Then, if appropriate, they are passed to a clinical assessment service.
• Within three weeks of the service launching we have had 220 calls – 34 of which were fast tracked. This number is across the ICS.
• There is very much an ICS-wide approach to all that is happening within this area.

Continuing Healthcare – Peggy West, Interim Co-ordinator of the Continuing Healthcare team

• The Continuing Healthcare team were re-deployed during the pandemic but have now returned to work, mainly from home. The first thing they did was continue with assessments and these were all completed by the 31 March deadline.
• The team works closely with St Clare Hospice and EPUT district nurses, who carry out all the assessments which need to be done in the community, with the team’s support.
• One of the areas the team is working very hard on is personal health budgets and later this year Liz Hall, Head of Continuing Healthcare, is due to return from maternity leave.

Quality – David Wallace, Deputy Director of Nursing

• The team covers a very broad area including children’s services, community health care, PALS (Patient Advice and Liaison Service) and complaints and serious incidents and understanding the harm they cause.
• It is about having a good relationship with the provider and understanding the impact on staff as well, while needing to make sure learning has taken place while collecting evidence of this.
• We have a quality lead in primary care and we also have a safeguarding function.
• Patients voice is essential to all we are doing.
• By extension we are also involved in infection, prevention and control so we have our fingers in many pies. It’s about building strong relationships.
• The team had a total of 244 PALS queries from 1 March 2021 to 30 April 2021 – it has gone up hugely over the past few months.
• Rob Gerlis – building all of those relationships is very important and a testament to the team as to how successful that is, so a big thank you to David and the team.
• Jackie Hall – one of the big concerns from patients right now is not being able to get appointments with their GP.
• Anurita Rohilla – remember there are 30 practices. Patients for some of these practices are finding it easy to get in to see their GP – you only hear about the ones who cannot.
• GP practices are seeing a really unusual spike in demand and some are working until 10pm to meet this. The practices have been working throughout, we need to meet the needs of those who need to be seen but we need to encourage the use of pharmacies in the first instance for example.
• Theresa Smith – a warm welcome to Christian Jennings who has taken up his post as Senior Primary Care Project and Transformation Manager. One of Christian’s first projects is around the COVID vaccination programme.

  General update – Peter Wightman

• It would be good to get further feedback on the first joint ICS-wide all staff briefing session which took place last week using Teams Live. It would be good to get suggestions for future meetings.
• Papers are being finalised for the joint board meeting on Thursday 27 May, when the new hospital scheme is among the agenda items.
• There has been an amazing response to the survey sent out about returning to the office – 120 have been sent in and these will be used to start building some common principles. There is still time to complete the survey if you have not already done so, before the deadline on Friday 28 May.
• We have also started looking at office options and having been invited to look we made a site visit to Kao Park, Church Langley. So we are starting to get a sense of what is out there. This is all at a very early stage and we will be looking at all sorts of aspects including parking and transport and will keep you all updated.