Chief Executive Stakeholder newsletter – March 2024
Hello all,
March was a busy month for us – most notably due to urgent work to respond to a Major Incident at East Surrey Hospital, and you can find out more about this below.
In March we also turned to our budgets and plans for 2024/25, carried out works to improve our visitor car parks and took time to recognise our staff for their brilliant work through our annual Star Awards.
Our services
Major Incident
On 22 March, planned work was taking place to replace an obsolete transformer. This required the mains power supply to be switched to two hired backup generators. During this time the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) which supplies our main computer room failed, impacting our IT and digital systems. We declared a Critical Incident and enacted our internal response plans. While systems were recovering and starting to come back online - one of the hired generators failed, causing power interruptions to the recovering IT and digital systems and numerous areas of the hospital. This forced us to close our Emergency Department and declare a Major Incident which triggered a whole system response.
While power was restored quickly, it took time to ensure systems were fully stable before we could re-open to emergency patients. Teams worked over the weekend to ensure all patient records of actions during the downtime were fully updated. While this incident was a combination of two separate incidents and was caused by a different power issue to last month’s Critical Incident, all are linked to the age of the estate at East Surrey Hospital. The Trust will be carrying out a comprehensive debrief of both incidents, as well as working with system and NHS England colleagues on a wider external review of its ageing electrical infrastructure – including the risks related to addressing these and the steps needed to significantly reduce the possibility of such incidents in the future.
Masks in clinical areas
As Spring finally arrives and we see the lower and less frequent spikes of seasonal winter infections such as Covid, Flu and Norovirus in our hospital, from today we will be stepping down our mask wearing guidance in clinical areas. This means visitors to our hospital and patients will no longer need to wear a mask whilst in clinical areas or during appointments, unless they wish to. As always, we will continue to encourage good hand-washing hygiene for anyone coming on our site and ask those experiencing symptoms of the illnesses above to wear a mask or stay away from the hospital where possible. This will help keep staff and patients in our care as safe as possible.
Easter bank holiday
Like many other NHS trusts, we worked hard to prepare our services for the anticipated demand over the Easter bank holiday - including discharging patients who are ready to go home to ensure we have bed capacity for those who need it. To help support our teams on duty and ensure emergency care was available for those who needed it, we also signposted
our patients and local communities to the Emergency Department alternatives that are available for those who don’t require urgent or life-threatening care – ensuring they have all the information needed to choose which NHS service they need wisely.
Our partners
Year end
The Trust are on track to deliver the ‘re-forecast’ position agreed with NHS England at month 10 and improve our forecast outturn for 2023/24. We will therefore end the financial year with a 5.1% cost saving in 2023/24. Although the 2024/25 financial plan for the system is not yet approved, in last Thursday’s Board we discussed a starting budget for the next financial year. This is only an initial budget at this stage but has a planned deficit of £49.9m, and a savings plan of £20m – which is 4.3% of the turnover calculated.
Looking ahead to 2024/25
As we look more carefully at our budgets for the next financial year, which I expect to be much tougher, we will also be working more closely with our partners across both Surrey and Sussex to consider how we will plan to deliver safe, quality care and manage the competing financial pressures we all face. As part of this work, in March I met with Chief Executives from across Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care System to consider the joint opportunities for improving productivity as part of the Acute Provider Collaborative. Working together on these is vital for ensuring we are operating in a planned and strategic way as a whole system so we can meet the targets we, and the wider NHS, have set for the years ahead, and importantly, deliver for our local communities.
East Surrey College
In March I also met with the Chief Executive of East Surrey College to hear about the impressive work being delivered at the College and explore potential opportunities to work more closely together on getting more students into healthcare roles in the future - including supporting the college to introduce the Health T Level (two-year courses equivalent to A-levels) from next September – which will be a really positive step.
Trust news
Star Awards
In the second half of the month we recognised 15 teams or individual members of staff in the 2024 SASH Star Awards, which took place – thanks to our SASH Charity sponsors - at the Mayor’s Office in Reigate. With nominees across 11 categories in attendance – including patient experience, supporting diversity in the workplace and innovation and service improvement – it was a great way to end an extremely busy and challenging financial year, by celebrating the inspiring and brilliant work of our teams. Congratulations again to all our winners, and all those who still go above and beyond for our patients every day!
Recognising our nurses and midwives
At the beginning of March Tina Hetherington, our Chief Nurse, launched the Daisy Awards at SASH – a global recognition programme from the DAISY Foundation to celebrate excellent
clinical care delivered by nurses and midwives. The rollout at SASH means nurses and midwives here can now be nominated by patients, families, and colleagues who experience or observe extraordinarily care that goes above and beyond. You can find out more about the award and how to nominate someone from SASH here.
Staff Survey
In March our 2023 Staff Survey results were also published. While we are looking closely at what they show and what meaningful steps we will take at an organisational, divisional and team level as part of our trust-wide action plan, I am really pleased that more members of staff responded than last year and the results are more positive than in 2022 - with improvement in eight out of nine People Promises and results that trended above the national average in 77% of areas. This included significant improvements in both the number of staff recommending SASH as a place to work and as a place for a friend or relative to receive treatment. That said, we still have much more to do to improve in those key areas identified by our teams.