Published on: 25 October 2019

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Hello everyone

Autumn – what a season. I love the colours of the trees and that stormy overcast blustery look that the weather can take on. And of course there’s Bake-Off, Strictly, The Apprentice…not to mention Halloween and thoughts turning to what to buy for Christmas presents…it all adds up to a beautiful season in many ways.

But I’m noticing just how dark it is when leaving the house each morning – a clear reminder of the winter coming. And this week we submitted our official “Winter Plan” as a Pennine Lancashire system. It’s a plan for £2.5 million of investment for extra services from November to March. Extra shifts, longer opening of ambulatory care, more staff, continued opening of Ward 19, and so on. GPs are offering more appointments. Social Services put more staff on and offer more “Home First” slots for us.

We want to make sure we’re maximising the efficiency of everything we do, just so that we can cope this winter. To get things off to a good start we’re holding a “Perfect Week”.

This will be the week commencing Monday 4 November. It’s a chance to put extra staff into all parts of the patient journey, and to really take a deep dive into what might cause delays in getting investigations, scans, discharges and so on. We will be running it from Trust HQ control room (The Boardroom) each day.  We want any delays to be escalated, and this way we will learn what things we can change to put right. I hope you will be able to consider how your ward and your area can contribute to the success of our “Perfect Week”. Keep a look out for more communications which will be coming out at regular intervals between now and then!

Thank you to everyone who has had the flu jab. Already a wonderful 37.4% of our staff have been immunised, ahead of where we were this time last year. All part of winter preparations thank you!

The time has come for me to hand back to Kevin. As you will have seen from Kevin’s recent emails, he takes up the reins once again as Chief Executive of both ELHT and Blackpool from the end of this month. It has been a great privilege for me to be Acting up in Kevin’s absence, I’m grateful to Kevin for giving me the opportunity, and I’m very grateful to every one of our staff for the help and support that has been given to me. As I say it is a big burden of responsibility doing the job, but a huge privilege, and a real honour to serve staff and patients.

So I’ll sign off for now, Remember the clocks go back this weekend. And there’s one final Dad joke for you:

Did you hear about the wooden car with the wooden wheels and the wooden engine? It wooden start.

Thank You to all for your work which keeps ELHT performing so well despite so many challenges.

Best wishes, Damian