Bulletins

Better Together – March 2022

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This is the second edition of our regular publication to keep staff and partners up to date with the Hounslow and Richmond Community Healthcare and Kingston Hospital Better Together programme.

You will find all our updates on our Better Together microsite.

Executive teams

We told you last month that we are bringing the HRCH and Kingston Hospital executive directors together into one team working across both trusts.

Our consultation with executive directors about what this means for them has now ended and we will be talking with staff at our Q&A, and stakeholders later this week about the new single executive team.

Shaping the future of patient safety

We have worked together to recruit six members of the public as patient safety partners – two each for Hounslow and Richmond Community Healthcare, Kingston Hospital and Your Healthcare.

All three organisations are looking forward to welcoming them when they start working alongside our staff, to ensure our decisions are considered from a patient perspective.

At the moment, our patient safety partners are participating in local and national training, before taking up their roles for a minimum of two years each. When training finishes, they will join all our committees with a patient safety, risk and quality remit.

Their role is to act as patient advocate, reflecting the voices and needs of people who use hospital and community-based health services, including patients, family members, carers and the public.

They will be actively involved in the design of safer healthcare at all levels across our three organisations, representing the voice of the individual.

Watch this video to hear directly from colleagues and one of the new recruits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHG08-kXBpk

Joint recruitment project

Hounslow Primary Care Networks (PCNs) have been working with us on hosting the Primary Care Training Hub within HRCH since October 2020. Together, we aim to develop training that uses our joint skills and expertise – and to share some training when possible.

The Hounslow Consortium team, in collaboration with seven other boroughs in NW London, have just won the contract to work in partnership on the new NW London-wide Primary Care Training Hubs. The PCNs needed to recruit a training manager to oversee this.

Nikki Hill is the lead for learning and development at Kingston Hospital and HRCH and also has a background in primary care, so she offered to help the PCNs with their recruitment.

Roz King, primary care networks director at HRCH, and Nikki interviewed candidates for the new training manager role.

Roz says: “Nikki’s understanding of primary care was instrumental in helping us to select the strongest candidate, not just in terms of training skills, but someone who had transferable skills that would work well with primary care, especially as there are so many stakeholders in this project.

“This is the first time a Kingston Hospital team members has been able to help Hounslow PCNs with one of their programmes of work and the outcome has been good.”

The new training manager, Karen DeSay, joins HRCH on 6 June and will be line managed by Nikki, so will get all the professional expertise and support she needs.

Long COVID Service

Hounslow and Richmond Community Healthcare is running a series of sessions for HRCH, Kingston and Your Healthcare colleagues who want to know more about Long COVID and what can help.

Whether they or a family member or friend are living with Long COVID, or they are working with patients or colleagues who have Long COVID, they will leave the session knowing a lot more about the subject.

The sessions are hosted by the Richmond Long COVID Service and each session will start with a 30-minute presentation followed by a 30 minute Q&A.

Dates and topics

On the same theme, Nic Newman, Strategy and Transformation Service Improvement Manager at HRCH, recently joined Cllr Jim Millard on Richmond Council’s ‘Talk Richmond’ podcast, to discuss long COVID.

They were joined by Genevieve Bagge, Long-Term Health Conditions Lead and Senior Therapist for Richmond Wellbeing Service. This is a great example of partnership working across the NHS and local councils.

Nic was involved in setting up HRCH’s Richmond Long COVID Service in November: Read more about it and is now working on setting up a similar service in Hounslow.

Listen to the Talk Richmond podcast

Partnership working

It was an historic week for us on Wednesday 23 February, when the boards of HRCH and Kingston Hospital came together for a first joint board development session in advance of our first Committee in Common (CiC) in April,

It was apparent that our two organisations had much in common from the values we live, to the way we put the service user first, while being innovative and flexible in our approach.

The CiC will be empowered to make key strategic decisions with the benefit of expertise and insight from across the full range of services. It will enable the two trusts to make joint decisions and deliver services across organisational and geographical boundaries.

Coming together and sharing our resources better will enable us to achieve what we cannot do as individual organisations. We will be able to solve health and care challenges that are too big for us to overcome on our own.

We are really excited about this opportunity to create a vibrant, supportive culture in which staff can develop, innovate, deliver and support outstanding care for the people of Hounslow, Kingston and Richmond.

We continue to explore ways to streamline our governance arrangements and to pool resources, so we can increase the resilience of some of our smaller teams who are faced with ever-rising demand and complex caseloads.

Joint forums for allied health professionals

Amy to provide if the information is available.