COVID-19 Update 7Preparing to work from homeIn my update prior to the weekend I want to start by saying thank you for the incredible work you have all being doing to keep our services running over the past week. As you would expect, the senior team has also been working tirelessly to prepare the Trust for the changes to our way of life that the government is implementing and will continue to implement. I couldn’t possibly write a list of individual “thank you” messages to staff as it would simply take too long. Please keep going for your colleagues and most importantly our service users. At this moment in time there is only one objective that our Trust is working to – to maintain the safety and care for our staff and service users. Jonathan O'Brien - Director of Operations and Deputy Chief Executive Service Continuity Arrangements Over the past few days we have been working hard to understand what the government’s decisions on isolation, school closures and the avoidance of travel / social distancing mean for us. It is clear that the government’s decisions in relation to these matters mean significant service changes have to be implemented immediately and we will be doing so from Monday 23rd March 2020. A clear message I wish to reinforce following Peter’s blog earlier in the week, is that from Monday 23rd March 2020, where it is possible and appropriate for staff to do so, we will support you to work remotely or from home. However, there are many of our services or elements of services that we must keep running for our service users and the wider health economy. We have deemed these “critical services” and the maintenance of these will be the Trust’s priority in terms of resources and staff deployment. Following two sessions with senior staff which took place on Tuesday and Thursday this week, I am able to provide you with the first of our Service Status updates. This document is self-explanatory and the team who have taken responsibility for making these decisions is detailed in the document. Directorates have been and will continue to be working to implement these plans. Please liaise with your line manager to understand the impact on your individual service. Home working – narrative and risk assessments As I have stated, we will support you to work from home where it is possible and appropriate to do so. To assist you in doing this, we have produced:
Message from Team Prevent Team Prevent are experiencing an extremely high volume of calls from Employees and Managers requesting advice and information on Coronavirus, which is currently generating In line with Government and Public Health England Guidance they are referring employees to www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus- covid-19/ They are also receiving extremely high numbers of calls from Managers who are calling the helpline for advice on employees fitness to return to work, Coronavirus and other issues. Having undertaken a dynamic risk assessment they will be assigning all Clinicians on our contract, who are currently advising on management referrals, to pre-placement health assessments and the OH Manager helplines to ensure that managers can access timely advice and hopefully help people stay at or return to work safely. This will inevitably impact on the KPIs and will create a backlog of referrals. They will monitor this situation in real time and if and when the call volumes reduce, they will re-assign Clinicians to Management Referrals and keep us informed. They will then discuss with us how we would like them to manage the backlog of referrals as it is highly likely that additional resources will need to be assigned to manage these. In an effort to help clear any NHS staff requiring fitness for work medicals, they will be assigning additional Occupational Health Technicians to assist their Nurses in increasing the numbers of pre-placement medicals they are able to clear in any one session. We will continue to monitor the situation and keep you updated. Payroll information - don't let it slip! The Finance Team are prioritising their workload, ensuring with our payroll provider that our staff are paid as usual with no interruption due to the current coronavirus issue. They are confident they have a robust contingency plan in place so there is minimal risk to this. However, the payroll team are reliant on our staff to continue to ensure that they submit / approve easy forms, complete e-rostering information etc for the feeds to enable bank staff are paid. They advise that we absolutely cannot let this slip and have bank staff missing out on their pay, as it's likely our payroll provider won’t have the usual capacity to go above and beyond and chase people up, so the key message is that during this period it's extremely important that managers responsible for payroll submissions ensure these are done by the required deadlines. |