Hello Readers
I am delighted to be this week’s guest blogger.
I want to start off by mentioning the unannounced CQC visits that have been made to our community and older people’s services this week. I am extremely impressed by how you have all embraced the opportunities to showcase the amazing work that you do. The CQC-led focus groups that have been held for staff to give their views about life at ELHT have gone extremely well and the discussions were extremely positive.
The CQC inspectors gave us some initial high-level feedback from their visit and the point they wanted to stress was that they were well looked after and thoroughly enjoyed inspecting our services. They met happy staff and happy patients! In particular, they told us they were really impressed with team working aspects in Community Hospitals, district nursing services and integrated neighbourhood teams. My sincere thanks go out to all the staff that the CQC met on all the wards and in all the clinics. You have certainly made a good impression!
Our IT Department have begun a 12-week programme of installing a ‘Managed Print Service’ this week. The service is designed to improve efficiency across the Trust whilst achieving estimated cost savings of around £300,000. There are also significant environmental benefits. Implementation is going extremely well, with staff already reaping the benefits from more reliable and efficient printing. Staff can find out when they are due to be accessing the service by going onto the Trust intranet.
At the start of August we welcomed our new intake of trainee doctors with approximately 100 new doctors starting work at all levels across the trust. You might also have noticed that we are introducing a colour-coded uniform scheme for all doctors in training.
There's great advantage in this approach because it means that in an emergency it's very easy to see and identify a doctor and their grade. The rollout of this uniform policy has begun with doctors in their first two years of training and over the next few months and early part of next year will be progressing for most of our doctors in training. We will also be welcoming new students from Lancaster University as well as from UCLan, and the medical students will have specific colour-coded uniforms too.
Our stroke team go from strength to strength and have just been awarded "A" rating in the national stroke audit for the second time running. This is a huge achievement and our thanks go to all the therapists, nurses, admin trams, managers and doctors who run our stroke services.
The amazing achievements of our staff are not just in the workplace; Congratulations to anaesthetist Dr Justin Roberts who has just accomplished swimming the English Channel as part of a team event. Well done Justin!
The long summer holiday period is now coming to an end so I would like to end by recognising our staff who have spent the last few weeks juggling work and family child care. It is especially challenging when the children are not in school so thank you!
Well, that’s it from me!
Until next time…
Damian