Staff at George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust have marked NHS Change Day by making pledges to further improve the care and service they give to local people.
NHS Change Day is a grassroots movement that aims to harness the collective energy, creativity and ideas of thousands of people to improve the care and wellbeing of people who use healthcare services, their families and staff.
NHS Change Day was launched last year and aims to get as many people as possible to pledge to do one thing to make the NHS better. Pledges can be big or small, personal or professional; the only stipulation is that they must make a positive difference to patient care.
More than 300 members of staff took the opportunity to make a personal pledge to do one thing to improve the care and service they provide to patients. They joined more than 300,000 NHS staff around the country in making a pledge.
The Trust’s executive team led the way by pledging to do their bit to support the implementation of seven day working at the George Eliot by increasing their presence at the hospital outside of core hours.
The introduction of improved seven-day working patterns across the whole NHS was recently identified as a priority by the Department of Health Medical Director, Professor Sir Bruce Keogh. The Trust had previously identified this as a priority and started to implement improvements following an internal review of care in 2011 before the Keogh Review identified a need to increase the pace at which these improvements were delivered.
Chief Executive, Kevin McGee, said: “I was delighted to see so many of our staff taking part in NHS Change Day. The pledges they made didn’t have to be big; the idea is that the whole will be bigger than the sum of its parts and if everyone who makes a pledge delivers on it, that will lead to a significant improvement for our patients.
“Over the past 12 months, following the Keogh Review, the Trust has made significant improvements to the care it provides to patients and on course to deliver all the recommendations made. We’re viewing the Keogh process as just one step on our journey to providing consistently outstanding patient care and events like NHS Change Day ensure that we maintain the momentum and continue the good work we’ve started.”
Explaining the executive team’s pledge to do their bit to support the implementation of seven day working patterns, Kevin added: “The executive team is fully supportive of the ideal that our patients should expect to receive the highest standards of care and safety regardless of the time of day or night they arrive at the hospital.
“Improvements to seven day working have included, our radiology service expanding significantly, with routine outpatient MRI scans now taking place at weekends and staff on site to provide CT scans on Saturdays and the majority of Sunday. Similar expansions have also been made to pathology and pharmacy services. We’ve also increased our consultant cover, with six new consultant physicians recently recruited to run a seven-day service in our new Acute Medical Unit.”
