Dear Colleagues,
Firstly, Happy New Year to you all – I hope you all had a delightful festive period and the chance to get some down time with your family and friends.
Many of you were working over this period and will have noticed in our hospitals and our community we are, like the rest of the country, extremely busy. I’ve seen this first hand over the last few days in our acute areas, in the community and with colleagues in the ambulance service; there is no doubt that we are facing some significant challenges in keeping pace with the needs of our population.
I know you are all working incredibly hard to maintain the standards to which we all aspire; however, such increased pressure does bring increased risk as colleagues are tired and stretched. Making this more manageable is our primary goal for 2020.
This will be done in a number of ways. We will bring more acute beds onto the Stoke Mandeville site. We will prioritise strengthening and bringing more staff into our community services. We need to work better with GP colleagues and also with the Council in providing more rapid access to social care. Above all else, we need to continue to make BHT a great place to work and attract the numbers of skilled health care staff required to keep pace with our local population’s needs. We’ve made some strong progress in 2019 as you can see from the graph below, but there is still much more to be done.
The challenges we face are no different to other organisations, but we absolutely have the people here to continue to find creative and exciting ways to overcome these. I look forward to working with you on these over the next year.
Thank you for all that you do. If there is anything you want to let me know about, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Neil
@NMacdonaldBHT
07920 071814
neil.macdonald4@nhs.net
December Diary
Abbreviations: BOB ICS: Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire & Berkshire West Integrated Care System; Bucks ICP: Buckinghamshire Integrated Care Partnership; EMC: Executive Management Committee; GiRFT: Getting it Right First Time; SCAS: South Central Ambulance Service