A letter to our community

Dear Community,

Winter is a challenging time for all NHS systems and colleagues across the country, and we wanted to update you on the priorities from Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Our goal is to show you that our focus remains on providing exceptional patient care, delivered by our exceptional people for the months ahead – ensuring you know that we will continue to prioritise a safe and high-quality level of care. As Chief Executive and Chair, we want to be clear on the importance of what we’re planning and what we need to do – and to explain how your actions and support will make the difference. This is about doing the right thing for our patients and continuing to keep that at the heart of all we do.

Our Top Four Winter Priorities:

Quality and safety: Our vision to provide exceptional patient care is always our number one priority – guided by our CARE values – compassion, ambition, respect and encouragement.

Financial recovery and transformation - prevention of waste, increasing innovation, focusing on quality and delivering productivity. Things need to develop in the Trust to make significant savings and that means we’re reviewing what we do and how, and we are maximising our opportunities for quality, innovation, productivity and preventing waste: We’re looking at all these areas with colleagues and our assurance to you is that this will strive to improve the care and quality we provide.

Supporting people to stay well: We are encouraging everybody eligible to have their winter vaccines – you can find out more detail on eligible cohorts and booking here:

• Book your flu vaccine: www.nhs.uk/bookflu
• Book your Covid-19 vaccine: www.nhs.uk/bookcovid

This year for the first time, the NHS is offering the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine to those aged 75 to 79 and to pregnant women*. This is a year-round offer but its promotion ahead of winter by health professionals is vital, particularly to those at highest risk. These are particularly important to those colleagues who work clinically and our vulnerable members of our community.

We are continuing with our ‘Think Which Service’ and discharge campaigns to increase education on when to come to our Emergency Department. Did you know approximately 70% of patients in our ED would be more appropriately treated elsewhere? We know winter is likely to see Urgent and Emergency Care Services come under significant strain, and many patients will face longer waits at certain points in the pathway than acceptable, so we’re going to support this through education. You can help by advising your friends and family around all the more appropriate places to receive clinical care, when appropriate. You can help by following the guidance – using NHS111 and considering ‘if you can finish your tea, do you really need ED?’ which is a bit of a test of when to come to us over treatment centres, primary care or your local pharmacy.

Supporting #TeamCRH to stay well: We know that we can’t achieve any of these priorities without the hard work and support of all our colleagues, and we all have a part to play. We have facilities across the hospital to support this including our Health and Wellbeing Hub – allowing us to care for the carers. We are also pleased to have recently launched our Violence and Aggression policy which we hope reassures everybody that the Trust expects all our colleagues to be treated with respect and that we will take appropriate action to support anyone as a victim of violence and aggression. Colleagues are also having their say on how we improve through the National Staff Survey.

Finally, thank you to everyone across our communities for the year to date and the support we’ve had – especially to our Chesterfield Royal Hospital Trust Charity – as we head into winter, we’re confident we’ll continue to be stronger than ever.

Together with our colleagues here, we truly care and want to do the best for our patients and communities, and this is something we should all be proud of. After all, for many of us, together with our families, we live in these communities.

Together, we are committed to doing everything we can to support the provision of safe and effective care for patients this winter, as well as continuing to improve services for the longer term.

Best wishes for a healthy winter – please stay well and look after each other.

Dr Hal Spencer, Chief Executive

Mahmud Nawaz, Trust Chair