AS part of my new role as observer to the Board of the Royal Wolverhampton Trust. Here is a brief report of part of the Chief Executive Officers Board Report for their Board Meeting 29th June 2015 . Again today there was a very full Board Report with 42 individual headings. I have again picked out three of the reports to deal with in a little more detail.
Executive HR Summary Report – The Board heard a report marked Executive HR Summary Report Talking to this report the CEO stated that he had met the RWT trade unions recently they had informed him of a number of grades working in the hospital that were not receiving the Living Wage payment of £7.85 per hour. The CEO felt that this was not right, and proposed to the Board that the 458 staff who were affected by this issue, be uprated and the 13p per hour that would take the grades affected up to the Living Wage total, should receive it as and from a date in August. After Debate within the Board it was agreed that this was the course of action they would follow. The full cost of this uprating to RWT was reported by the CEO as being £88,000 in a full year for the 458 staff identified. Mr Loughton said “He hoped that by this action it would be recognised by other employers in the City, and his wish was that maybe other bigger business would follow the RWT action of placing workers onto the Living Wage scale”.
Health Futures UTC Prospectus Second Report on this item – I reported on the progress of the UTC in my last report at the beginning of this month. The latest update is that the 2015/16 School and Sixth Form Prospectus is now available.
The UTC based in West Bromwich opens in September . It is now Ofsted approved and it has 300 students enrolled. There is no selection criteria but the College will offer young people across the region the chance to combine an academic and educational opportunity, to earn the essential technical and practical skills needed in health sciences industry. There is an urgent need for advanced technical skills at all levels in this sector. Students attending the UTC will be well prepared for work in a wide area of health related sectors. The building is an investment of £10m with top notch Labs and IT infrastructure. This regional skill centre and learning establishment will help hospitals recruit the right staff, with the right culture and at the same time help local young people into work. The UTC will officially be opened in September of this year.
Integrated Quality & Performance Report – In my opinion there is a cause for concern in this report. On Quality the report picks out that hospital complaints had increased during May 2015 to 42 individual complaints in comparison against 36 received in the previous year. The overall Trust rate for May is 52% ; This is a deterioation of 8% on the previous month.
The Emergency Department continues to see increasing number of attendances. In May of this year it was 4.17% higher than the same period last year equating to an additional 433 attendances in a month. The Trust was predicting fines for this level of performance. So far June had seen an additional 107 attendances in the first 17 days of the month. Ambulance hand over saw a deterioration, a fine was also being anticipated for this level of service.
Cancer- is another area that I have concerns over as again the report is not good to read, as the hospital is predicting possible failure of the 62 day screening and the 62 day referral to treatment target for May.
70 Operations were cancelled in May. 65% of cancelled operations were due to bed pressure .
My view on this is that the public will believe that performance in this hospital should be better than this. There are staff issues and I will return to them in a later paper.
