I’m off camping with the family this weekend, a new site for us somewhere down towards Padstow. We don’t usually go away this early in the year, but were tempted into booking by the great weather we’ve had over the past ten days. We knew it was a risk when we booked and unfortunately the British weather has done its thing, and bank holiday weekend is now looking a little damp for us. Still, I mustn’t complain, it is after all an enormous privilege for all of us to live in a place where everyone else comes on holiday.

Just as I was reassessing my own risk-based weekend planning decisions, news was breaking of another unexploded bomb found in Plymouth – this time up in Southway. By the time this hits your inbox, I hope the bomb will have been successfully detonated, and that anyone impacted by the cordon will have been able to return home.  The risk tolerance for defusing a bomb (near zero) is somewhat different to that of booking 3 nights camping (apparently quite high), but nonetheless, the same principles to evaluating risk and making appropriate decisions apply in both scenarios.

All of you reading this will evaluate risk multiple times a day – often subconsciously and usually in real-time as you go about your daily business and as an organisation we try to accurately evaluate risks to understand how best to deploy our resources and in doing so, we hope we can avoid our biggest risks materialising into issues.  

Most NHS Trusts are quite good at evaluating and controlling the risks that might lead to single catastrophic events. Big fires in hospitals are nowadays, thankfully, incredibly rare, as our control measures are very good. We’re less good however at dealing with the risks which creep up over time, incrementally, imperceptibly. That perhaps don’t lead to a single big catastrophic event but might lead to lots of smaller issues materialising over time. The total impact might be just as serious as the single big event, but it generally isn’t perceived as such, as the issues just become part of BAU.

For our organisation, I think this applies in how we have deployed our capital resource to mitigate the risks posed by our equipment, infrastructure and built environment. We are good at investing when we might need to replace a big bit of equipment or infrastructure that is going to break. We are less good at investing in things which might have smaller impacts but to many more people.

And this is why we haven’t been good at finding the money to upgrade changing rooms, improve staff toilets, get better bike lockers, improve rest areas and staff rooms. We’ve always risk-assessed them out of the plan as there is nearly always something big that is about to go bang. But in not investing, we’ve failed to address what is actually our biggest risk, and our biggest opportunity, to help ensure the 10,000 people which make up this great organisation have what they need when they come to work, and feel invested in.

So we’re going to change that. This year, we have ringfenced nearly £1m in our capital plan to spend on staff facilities. We are going to distribute some of that to Divisions to allocate (I am a great believer that people know how best to spend the money in their own areas), and keep a bit centrally for some projects that might improve facilities for all staff across the Trust. We are hopefully going to replicate this investment in future years. We currently also have it in our 27/28 and 28/29 plans – so this is a great opportunity to think about what we can do over the next few years that will really make a difference to us all working here at UHP.

Divisional leaders should, in the coming weeks, be seeking input form teams across the organisation as to how best to spend their allocations, and as for the centrally held cash. I would love to hear your ideas. So, please do get your thinking caps on, email me, Teams me, stop me in the corridor to let me know where you think we should be investing. If you are off this weekend, I hope you have a relaxing bank holiday.  For those of you working – thank you – I’ll be thinking of you whilst shivering in my tent.