Hello readers, I hope you are all well and looking forward to the cold weekend ahead of us. I thought we’d seen the last of the beast from the east, but apparently not! That being the case, we are working hard in our hospitals to maximise patient flow, discharging patients as soon as possible once it’s deemed appropriate, so that we can maintain our performance over the busy weekend we expect. As always, I must ask all readers to play their part in helping us: staff across the Trust – do everything you can to facilitate discharges and support your colleagues in the ED and patients / members of the public - ask your friends and family to think about the most appropriate place they should go for treatment. As we say, A&E does not stand for always and everything. Our staff are doing a fantastic job, and I cannot thank them enough, but their job is made harder by the ongoing pressures they are facing.
Have you seen our latest publication ‘This is ELHT’? As the NHS celebrates its 70th year of existence, we have collected the stories of a cross section of our staff to show our community the kind of people who care for them, and the different roles they play in making ELHT the great place it is. Take a look at it here as I’m sure you’ll love it. We’ll be doing lots of other things over the year to celebrate this 70th anniversary, not least the launch of our ambitious appeal to raise £1,000,000 for our charity ELHT&Me. I do hope you will all consider supporting this appeal either by a direct donation, by fundraising, or simply by raising awareness of it. You can find all the details here. Your local hospital charity needs you!! And the NHS isn’t celebrating its 70th year alone. Lots of other organisations are getting involved. There’s the Parliamentary Awards where local MPs are to nominate deserving staff, and there are the BBC One Show’s Patient Awards with patients being asked to nominate. Take a look at the details and think about whether your colleagues are deserving of these awards. If so (and I am in no doubt that they are), make sure they are nominated.
Many departments from across the Trust will be taking part in the “Explore the Roles” careers event at Blackburn Sports and Leisure Centre at Blackburn College next week. We have a very proud tradition of recruiting local people to come and work for us, and thanks to our fantastic staff survey results we can say, with our hands on our hearts, this is a great place to work. I really hope that we attract lots of new staff to lots of different roles at this important event. There are many NHS organisations all fishing from the same pool for limited numbers of staff at the moment and we are really trying to stand out from the crowd. I hope that the combination of our staff survey results, our generally good performance across all indicators (the four hour standard being as difficult for us to achieve as it is for almost all trusts) and staff stories like those in the aforementioned ‘This is ELHT’, persuades any doctors, nurses, therapists and all other people, they should seriously consider coming to work for us. They won’t regret it.
That’s it for this week folks. Have a great weekend.
Until next time….
Kevin