Bustard Ride, community recovery and Cabinet updates

Hello,

We’d like to start with a thank you to all of you so far who have donated to our Bustard Ride, which takes place next Thursday in aid of mental health charity Wiltshire MIND. So far we have raised around £1,000 and we would like to extend a huge thank you for your kind donations which act as a real incentive for us to complete this challenge!

If you haven’t seen the full list of staff taking part please visit our donations page – if you haven’t made a donation yet, we’d really appreciate it if you could support us and your colleagues. We’re all cycling a long way for a really great cause and we would be grateful for as much support as possible. Thank you. Our #EPIC team will also be involved on the day with exercise bikes at County Hall, Monkton Park, and Churchfields.

As you’ll have heard, Tuesday 12 June marked 100 days since the attack in Salisbury and Cabinet held its meeting in the city. It was also announced that The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall will be visiting Salisbury next Friday (22 June) as part of the city’s recovery. Along with meeting members of the public and local businesses, Their Royal Highnesses will join a reception in the Guildhall to meet those who were the first responders at the incident and those who are helping deliver the recovery work to help the city get back to normal. It promises to be a really special day for Salisbury, helping to boost its profile, the local economy and restore confidence in this beautiful city that it is a great place to visit.

Cabinet discussed and approved a £9m spend on our digital programme, and as part of this we are working with Microsoft on a body of work that will ultimately improve the whole experience for customers. This means that all of us will need to work differently in the future and we’ll update more on what this will mean in future columns.

Cabinet also discussed an investment of £4m in housing to go some way towards meeting demand. It also discussed keeping the outdoor education centres at Oxenwood and Braeside open until the end of the year to allow time for proposals for future use of the buildings to be considered. The end of year budget position was also discussed and as a result of effective financial management we not only delivered a balanced budget in 2017/18, but also an underspend of £410,000.

Yesterday we held our regular forum with managers and heads of service and most of the meeting focused on ‘creating an EPIC workforce’. We always say that staff are our most important asset and we want to make sure that everyone is really engaged. There is clear evidence that the most engaged service areas are those that regularly report EPIC impressions and that complete the most e-learning, have the lowest sickness absences, highest take up of apprenticeships, and leadership and management courses. It was a good discussion, and there’s a lot for managers to think about, action, and discuss with all of you.

The positive work to further integrate partner agencies within our Support and Safeguarding Teams continues, with an Outreach Worker from Wiltshire Substance Misuse being aligned to the teams being confirmed this week. This builds on the Domestic Abuse Family Support Workers who have been within teams since April this year.  

Earlier this week we, along with a number of partners, took part in a Care Quality Commission Summit to discuss the recent targeted review of the local health and social care system, which was carried out earlier this year and published yesterday.

The review was commissioned because there are issues with how effectively the system works as a whole. The final report recognises the hard work and effort already being done by all staff and partners to improve the care and support for Wiltshire residents, and provides useful insight into the areas where we need to do more.

Some of the highlights include people who need care and support being kept safe, staff being recognised for their commitment and caring approach, and praise for our adult social care transformation. As always, what we really want to focus on in is the areas for improvement and we have already produced a detailed action plan to implement a single overarching strategy to address the following areas:

1. New Wiltshire health and social care model
2. A single overarching health and social care strategy, improving outcomes with a focus on prevention and early intervention
3. Strengthening joint commissioning across the whole system
4. Improving Wiltshire’s Health and Wellbeing Board effectiveness
5. Unifying and developing whole system governance arrangements
6. Developing a sustainable integrated workforce strategy
7. Implementing digital opportunities and information sharing across the system
8. Developing a single, integrated communications strategy

We’ll be talking about this a lot more over the next few weeks and months as this important programme of work develops. 

Alistair, Carlton and Terence