This will be my last ever Friday five article as I will leave the Trust in April. Swapping my weekly commute from Bristol for (semi) retirement focussing more on spending time with family, and early mornings walking/training our two labradors instead of emails and early meetings.

As I approach my last month with the Trust, I have spent some time reflecting on my ten years as Director of People at UHP  – there has obviously been a huge amount happen over the years and the Trust has expanded significantly, growing its workforce from around 6500 to 11000 over this decade.

Whilst I have many fantastic memories from my time here, there are some things that particularly stand out for me. One of these is the introduction of our Freedom to speak Up Service in my first year, which whilst part of a national campaign I think UHP has fully embraced and we have a terrific additional support service to staff with some amazing Guardians, both past and current.

We also launched our Learning from Excellence scheme in 2018  and have had now over 25,000 submissions which give a rich insight into the things that staff appreciate in one another. Learning from Excellence supports a Safety 2 approach which takes a positive and proactive stance to learning from what happens in ‘everyday’ care rather than focussing on the exceptions. We went on to link this with our Thank You card scheme which you can still use to show your appreciation for colleagues by clicking the link to submit and say thank you here. We know that saying thank you has a hugely positive effect both on the recipient but also the sender, and both are more likely to demonstrate further acts of appreciation.

Working to improve our culture and staff experience is of course a case of constant gardening. As you will know from our recent Daily Email, the National Staff Survey results were published last week and as is the case every year, it gives us a really deep dive into what staff feel about working here and is one of our most important data sets. Overall, we benchmark close to (but below) average in each of the people promise areas other than flexible working where we do really well. We need to improve our staff engagement score as well as continuing to tackle unacceptable behaviours in respect of violence, discrimination and sexual safely which are all unacceptable and counter to our values which we all hold so dearly. We have some teams who do things really well, and we need to both celebrate these and learn from them. Well done to the teams below for their results:

Highest scoring:
Hepatology Nursing
Histopathology
Enhanced Care Team
Software Development
Hospital to Home

Most improved:
Learning Disability Team
Acute Medicine
Lynher Ward
Learning and OD
Women and Children’s Theatres

I have every confidence that the Trust will continue to improve and to provide amazing services for the population of Plymouth and beyond, and I will continue to watch with interest after I leave.

Before I sign off however, I want to extend a huge personal thank you to the many many colleagues who have contributed to my tenure here being such a great experience. I of course want to thank all the fabulous and talented colleagues across the People team, but also others such as the support staff who keep the Exec team functioning, and the rest of you who do such amazing work to directly care for or provide support for our patients.