Chief Executive Fortnightly Blog to NHS Orkney Staff – 22 July 2024

Posted on:

Image of CE for Staff Fortnightly Blog

Message for All NHS Orkney Staff 

Hi All

I’m pleased that after a few weeks where it has felt pretty grey outside, that over the last week we have seen glimpses of sunshine returning. Let’s hope we see more of this better weather in the months to come, recognising the impact of the weather on our mental wellbeing. It’s certainly been a topic of conversation when I’ve been out and about over the last few weeks.

In this week’s blog I focus on:

  1. Our Quarter 1 Corporate Strategy reporting
  2. iMatter – your helpful feedback in response to our follow-up survey
  3. All staff briefing – an opportunity for you to send in questions in advance

Starting with our Quarter 1 (April – June) performance against our Corporate Strategy, our scorecard shows we are making good progress. Thank you to everyone for your hark work and focus.

There are three red rated areas where we are off track and are giving continued attention. These are appraisal rates, further strengthening our operational governance arm (ensuring all of our governance forums have clear and updated terms of reference and lines of reporting to our Senior Leadership Team) and developing a new Board Assurance Framework which aligns to our Corporate Strategy.

We are now well into Quarter 2, and remain focused on continuing our journey of improvement with the same momentum and focus – with these areas our highest priorities this year are:

  • Improving Planned Care
  • Recruitment and retention
  • Outpatient improvement
  • Improving access to our key services
  • Improving population health
  • Achieving our financial plan
  • Accelerating digital transformation (our top three digital priorities for the year are: update and migration of cCube, Community Electronic Patient Record and GP-IT reprovisioning.

Thank you to the 120 of you who responded to the iMatter follow-up survey where you provided us with some rich information about the specific changes you would like to see to further improve your experience of working here. We are working this through and had a good discussion at Area Partnership Forum with our staff side leads about this last week. We will share the headline feedback with you at our staff briefing tomorrow (see below) and communicate in the next few days the very specific changes we will be focusing on in direct response to your feedback so we can evidence we are listening and acting.

Our next all staff briefing is tomorrow (Tuesday at 9.30am).The subjects we’ll cover are:

  • Quarter 1 Corporate Strategy performance
  • iMatter follow-up survey – themes from your feedback (as above)
  • Financial performance Quarter 1
  • Island Games preparedness
  • Our digital priorities for 2024/25

This is also a forum for anyone to ask myself and our Executive Team any questions you may have. You fedback to us recently that you wanted a way to send your questions in advance and therefore, alternatively, you can send your questions ahead of the briefing to us and these can remain anonymous and asked on the day. You can send these to myself or our Communications Team. I look forward to seeing many of you there.

Have a great week everyone.

Best wishes.

Laura Skaife-Knight

Chief Executive