Sue's Post Board Blog - March 2018
Our Chair Professor Sue Proctor shares her thoughts following the Trust’s Board meeting on 29 March 2018 including the impact of the recent weather, sharing stories about our perinatal service, our performance, flu jabs and staff survey results.
It was a relief that we were spared the full extent of another Beast from the East over the Easter holidays – with rain and sleet being the mainstay of the weekend.
It gives me a chance, with hopefully some finality for this season, to thank our staff who went above and beyond when the snow hit us in February and March, and I have nothing but praise and admiration for the efforts in maintaining quality care for service users.
At our meeting on Thursday 29 March, the Board received a summary of the impact the weather had on our services and I’m pleased to report there were no incidents directly resulting from the snow. We maintained our crisis response, acute and urgent services throughout the disruption and we’ve got arrangements in place to catch up on the outpatient and routine appointments that had to be cancelled.
Sharing stories – helping mums with pre and post-natal depression
We were privileged to hear from Deborah Page, our Perinatal Service Manager who was accompanied by service user Bronwyn Ashton, as part of our Sharing Stories section of the Board meeting.
Deborah began with a stark statistic that maternal suicide is one of the biggest killers of women post birth. She introduced Bronwyn who talked about her own struggles and outlined the great work she’d been doing, which included chairing the Positive Steps Partnership peer support group for mums accessing the service: always such a lift to hear about great work at the start of our meeting.
How we’re doing
In February, our Crisis Team received and answered 4,079 calls via our Single Point of Access number. That’s just over 145 calls per day!
Incredibly they answered 82% of them within our one minute standard, and 96% of them within five minutes. I think these figures, reporting in our Combined Quality and Performance Report, are worth highlighting for two reasons.
Firstly, to praise the efforts of the staff in our crisis services who do such great work helping so many people experiencing urgent mental health problems.
Secondly, to highlight the level of demand that so many people seem to have such acute mental health needs.
I’m also glad to report that we’re making steady progress on reducing the number of people experiencing delayed transfers of care (DTOCs) and out of area placements (OAPs), and want to offer my sincere thanks to all our staff and partners who are involved in these improvements.
As of February, we’d got our DTOCs down to 11.2% against a target of 7.5%. This is as a result of some ongoing work with our commissioners and adult social care partners.
For OAPs, our aim is to admit all Leeds patients who need to be admitted into our beds and eliminate out of area placements over time. This is a really important objective for us and the NHS in general for improving patient experience and quality of care. Our OAPs steadily reduced during February from a peak of 19 to 12 by the end of the month. This is in part thanks to capacity management arrangements put in place by our acute inpatient service lead and her team so well done to you all.
Sticking it to Flu
The uptake of the flu vaccine amongst staff during the 2017/18 campaign was the best it’s ever been at our Trust. In total, 66% of staff opted to receive the vaccination and those involved in the campaign were congratulated. However, there is clearly more work to do in encouraging more staff to protect themselves, their patients and families from this virus.
Staff survey
Our Director of Workforce Development Susan Tyler gave us some further insight on our staff survey results following her briefing earlier in March and there’s a clear picture of improvement emerging.
I wanted to share this graph which shows how much we’ve improved over the last three years on all the key findings in the report when compared to other similar trusts.
This is something that’s backed up in a recent blog post from Listening into Action. Based on the latest NHS National Staff Survey results, their analysis looks particularly at how staff rate leadership and culture at their Trust. Check out their scatter map and league tables which show we’ve risen three places since last year against our peers.
Thank you to all those who took the time to complete their staff surveys. Teams across the Trust will be looking at their results in the coming weeks to decide how to act on them and I look forward to hearing more.
Now, roll on spring time.
Find out more about our Chair Professor Sue Proctor or follow her on Twitter at @DrSueP1.