Chief Executive Neil Dardis and our Executive leads presented a review of the past year and discussed how staying true to our values has helped us to progress our ambitious plans for the future.
Our Director of Finance, Nigel Foster, also provided an update.
You can view the meeting here:
*Please note the data presented by Neil at 9.15 mins about C-Diff, MRSA and Never events is incorrect. Annual cases of C-Diff = 41. Never Events = 6. MRSA = 10.
A number of measures can help to reduce attendances in emergency departments. These all have the same underlying message - make sure that you are choosing the most appropriate place for the care that you need and if you are unsure, visit NHS 111 online or call them first.
Long term conditions are almost always best supported by your GP, while your local pharmacist can offer a number of over the counter remedies.
Walk-in centres and Minor Injuries units may also often be able to see and treat you - much quicker than your local emergency department.
Emergency departments will always see and treat patients in order of clinical priority, caring for those with urgent, life threatening conditions first. Patients whose needs are not urgent may face a very long wait.
This is quite difficult and potentially subject to change, but we know how important visitors are to the wellbeing and recovery of our patients. It's that fine balance around visitors versus protecting our patients and staff when we know the prevalence of Covid in the community is increasing, but we don't act alone. We follow the national guidance on this and we work with our neighbouring organisations and regional colleagues in the South East to try and ensure that we have some standardisation of approach around this.
We have some restrictions at the moment, including the need to book your visitation slot so that we can manage the number of people on our wards and the ability to maintain social distancing. Of course, we also ask all visitors to wear a face covering or mask (unless medically exempt) and to please ensure that you do not visit if you have any Covid symptoms. This is to protect our patients and our staff.
So, it's a fine balance that we are keeping an eye on all the time, as we have been over the last 18-months.
We have done a huge amount of work around strongly encouraging all staff to get vaccinated and we have very high compliance rates with our vaccination programme. We've used a number of measures to support staff to get vaccinated and to answer any questions or address any concerns that they might have had so as to ensure the greatest possible uptake.
Following new national guidance issued this week we will be working hard with our staff to ensure that all of our colleagues are vaccinated before April 2022.
We recognise and agree that there is some variability around how we communicate with family members and carers. It is something that we tried to work really hard on during the pandemic and it links to the restrictions that we had to put in place around visitation. We had to completely redesign how we were going to communicate with relatives, and we did a lot, but there is more to do as we ae not there yet.
We are working to reduce that variability as to how we communicate. Some of the initiatives we have in place are around the ward ambassador, which is a key role as that person is ensuring that we create and maintain those links with families and carers if they are not able to visit.
Our brilliant new electronic patient records system, Epic, is also going to make such a difference as the patient portal will allow clinicians and patients to work together in partnership around their care plan and patients can share this with their families.
Epic is scheduled to go live at the end of March, 2022.
Going paperless is an absolute ambition and Epic, the patient record, will be launching at the end of March next year. The idea is that at as we launch this we go paperless wherever we can.
Epic also encodes clinical pathways, so it will set how we treat patients, which will lead to a consistency throughout our organisation as virtually everything we do will be through Epic. The other great advantage is that it allows us to enshrine best practise. The national campaign around this, called Getting it right first time (GiRFT), has a lot of recommendations which will be built into Epic as part of its configuration. This ensures consistency and that the absolute best option for best practise is being used for treating patients.
The patient portal will also be key in helping patients with long term conditions to manage these.
Epic will also link into our primary care colleagues, giving them access to see what has happened to their patients during their treatment with us.
The improved communication between all the clinicians involved in the patient's care reduces risk and certainly improves outcomes.
Epic's patient portal will allow patients to view their medical records and work in partnership with their clinicians around their care. It will also be key in helping patients with long term conditions to manage these.
Epic will also link into our primary care colleagues, giving them access to see what has happened to their patients during their treatment with us.
The improved communication between all the clinicians involved in the patient's care reduces risk and certainly improves outcomes.
We don't have any formal plans to expand our community services into these areas. They are already provided by our fantastic colleagues at Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust, who are very well established and provide a great set of community services, as we now do in North East Hampshire, Farnham and Surrey.
There is a growing expectation and desire for us to work much more closely together, so what you will see hopefully, is a dilution of the boundaries between these organisations that provide health and care in the future. Things are far more joined up, so if you take respiratory services for example, that are provided in that area: these are a blend of staff from Frimley Health and Berkshire Healthcare who work seamlessly as one team, from our consultants in the acute hospitals through to the physios and nurses working in the community services.
So that's our ambition and aspiration: that things are far more joined up, focused around our patients and not around organisation boundaries in the future.
Our new hospital will have six operating theatres, 48 inpatient beds and 22 day-case cubicles and provide operations, diagnostics and outpatient care to both NHS and private patients.
At the moment there are no plans to buy a buggy for the building and the reason for this is that a lot of careful design work has gone into the building and its layout. Most of the areas that patients will need to get to quickly, such as the outpatient areas, are really close to the main entrances, so there is not a long distance to walk. It is things like the operating theatres that are further away in the hospital. If you are familiar with the corridors at Frimley Park or Wexham, there are none of those sorts of distances that patients will need to be walking.
There are no plans to charge for missed outpatient appointments. If there were ever any plans to do that, that would be something that would be a nationally mandated change to the way in which hospitals operate. It's not something that we would be looking to implement locally, though of course, there is a cost to us every time an appointment is missed, so please do attend.
We have a fantastic programme here at Frimley Health called Frimley Excellence. One of the things it is focused on is improving the way we work as a Trust and standardising processes and procedures within wards, across wards and across our sites.
We also work closely with community and system partners to find ways of working smarter together to drive efficiencies and simplify or standardise processes where it is possible and makes sense to do so.
This is an ongoing piece of work though and it will continue to develop and evolve, so keep an eye on our website where we will share all our latest news stories and successes.
Trusts regularly work together to share best practice and learnings, however, it's not always possible to work in exactly the same way. This is because each Trust's infrastructure and facilities are different. In addition, the types of patients from the communities served will differ. Where you have a Trust that serves a population with a higher frail/elderly community, they might prioritise including a specific pathway (treatment process) for this group of patients. Similarly, a Trust in a community with higher numbers of children may need a larger paediatric provision.
It's really important to us that we're both very transparent and open around senior staff remuneration and that we are held to account on it through forums like our Annual Members' Meeting.
All payments made to senior staff have been in line with contractual arrangements and that all of those have been overseen by governance arrangements, through our Board, and indeed through senior NHS oversight.
We've got to look at what the challenges of the future are going to be and how we are going to tackle them. Sometimes that needs different levels of skills and different approaches to make sure we succeed.
We spent £22m on IT last year, which is an unprecedented level compared to anything we had spent previously in that area. We are moving to the forefront of advances in digital medicine and technology and being at the forefront of that in the NHS.
Giving our patients the latest advances in technology often needs different leadership and different skills to support our teams so that we can deliver improvements for our patients.
This is a bit like an insurance premium which we have to pay as a Trust, into a national scheme that funds all the claims the NHS receives or those unfortunate incidents where there has been clinical negligence. It's based on three main things. The first thing is the size of the Trust - the larger the hospital or Trust, the greater the premium payment will be.
The second is around the services that the Trust provides - some services have higher risks than others and here probably the largest factor is the number of babies that are born. This is because as sadly if something goes wrong with a birth, the cost could be quite considerable as this could include a lifetime of care costs. So the more babies that are born in your Trust, the larger that premium payment will be.
Finally, the third thing is that there is an adjustment made based on your record (your history in terms of performance) and I'm pleased to say that we've seen a reduction in some of the levels of premium because of our investments in maternity services, so we've had a rebate from some of those premiums because of the investments we've made to keep mums and babies safe.