Published on: 10 January 2020

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Hello everyone

You will have heard talk about the NHS adoption of the improvement strategy Vital Signs throughout the Trust; in fact it’s been mentioned in the blog once or twice too. Over the last 12 months various teams have been receiving training and implementing the methodology to reduce waste. If you attended one of the Team Brief meetings or received Team Brief locally you will already be aware of our financial position and how, by applying these very simple waste reduction techniques, we can save time, energy and money.

Over the course of the next three months we must work together to spring clean our processes, tidy up on our practises and make sure we are all doing our part to be more productive and efficient.

The most positive way of managing our finances is to embrace new ideas and to look to do things differently and hopefully more effectively. For example, after a thorough review of how the Trust uses its translation services, we’ll shortly be introducing a new 24-hour, 365 day a year digital translation service covering more than 500 languages. In today’s increasingly multicultural society, we have a significant number of requests for translation and this advanced technology solution will deliver reduced costs and speed up the process, making it better for patients and our wards/clinics. No-one would argue that it’s better to be more efficient and we’ll be rolling out a major communication campaign about the new service in the very near future.

I’ve also been reliably informed there will be a special ‘appointment’ soon. Watch out for Tim Woods who will be helping and enabling us to continue our improvement journey. I’m sure he’s going to be invaluable!

Continuing the improvement theme, next week is going to be another Perfect Week! Once again we will be focusing on making every effort to improve our patients’ stay from start to finish. Working on the progress made in November, this follow-up session will aim to improve the care and rule out delays for patients from the minute they arrive until their discharge. We made great strides in solving delays in discharge and reducing the average length of stay last time, I know this following week will be equally successful. To get you all focused and ready to go, the Communications Team, working with operational leads, have created this fabulous Perfect Week video.

The new, fast flow 35-bedded Emergency Surgical Unit (ESU), which opened at the end of December on the Royal Blackburn Teaching Hospital, is already showing just how important it is to embrace change. This development, along with ward moves and mergers, is part of the ongoing redesign of the acute surgical pathway. By using the tried and tested waste reduction methodology, the changes made will help to enhance patent experience by reducing unnecessary ward moves and ensuring continuity of care. So many of you have been involved in this vital development work. A huge thank you goes to you all for your hard work and diligence in bringing and continuing to bring positive changes to the Trust.

My last words go to say today is the closing day for our fantastic Star Awards. It’s definitely the highlight of the year! It poses an excellent opportunity to acknowledge and recognise everything that our staff and volunteers do. But it also enables colleagues, patients and relatives to express heartfelt gratitude. The event lets us all say thank you for the exceptional work carried out at the Trust. Next week the judges will begin the arduous task of deciding, from over 400 applications, the three finalists from each category who will progress to the next round of judging. I think you’ll agree they certainly have their work cut out!

Good luck to all the nominees and thank you to the nominators!

Thank you for reading, until next time.

Kevin