Brighton hospital chief responds to watchdog’s concerns

The man in charge of the Royal Sussex County Hospital has written to staff after the Care Quality Commission – the official regulator – raised concerns in a report published last week.

Matthew Kershaw, the chief executive of the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “On Wednesday (2 April) the Care Quality Commission published a report detailing the findings from the listening events they held in December and January.

“The report contains some real positives, not least that the all patients they spoke to were complementary about the quality of their care.

“It did though also highlight some real challenges and one of the recurring themes is, in their words, tensions among staff and issues relating to the behaviours of individual staff members.

“We were able to say in response to this particular issue that we are well aware we have some longstanding, difficult and complex cultural issues to address and a great deal of work is already under way to do so – one of the main elements being our values and behaviours project which has been progressing at full speed since the beginning of the year.

Matthew Kershaw

“The objective of the first phase of the project was to collect the views of as many staff as possible and use these to create a ‘behavioural blueprint’ – a set of behaviours that our staff have said they want everyone to live by.

“The values and behaviours project team have run dozens of focus groups across the whole trust as well as offering staff the opportunity to share their views in private one-to-one conversations or by email.

“To date the views of over 700 staff have been collected and the final couple of focus groups are running this week.

“The feedback received has been combined into themes from which five values, and for each value a related set of behavioural dos and don’ts, have been created – the first draft of our behavioural blueprint.

“The next step is to get your views on this to ensure it reflects what you want.

“You can view our draft behavioural blueprint and what we need staff to do is read it, think about it, talk to each other about it and then answer the following question.

“If everyone demonstrated these behaviours would BSUH be a better place to work and would our patients receive better care? If not, what is missing?

“Ultimately though these are words on a page until we build a plan to ensure they are highly visible, embedded in the way we operate, that the necessary support is in place to enable people to live by them and to ensure when people don’t we take appropriate action.

“Which is why an implementation plan setting out how we will do this is also being developed, alongside the behavioural blueprint, and both will be published at the beginning of May.”

“Finally I want to offer my personal thanks to the whole values and behaviours project team who have worked very hard to get us to this point.

“These are staff who have done this on top of their day jobs and have volunteered their time to attend project meetings, facilitate focus groups and to turn the views and experiences of hundreds of our staff into a set of coherent values and behaviours which I hope, when complete, will resonate with everyone and make a positive difference to how it feels to work here and therefore on the quality and consistency of the care we provide for our patients.”