Our CEO Daniel Robinson reflects on the past three months
Within this blog, I share my insights from across Shropdoc with a view to highlighting the sterling efforts our staff have all made over the Christmas period as well as our continued work to support our community and updates on key developments within the organisation.
Our Commitment – Ensuring the Best for our Patients
Working during the festive season is an accepted part of the healthcare profession to ensure patients continue to receive the best possible care - and I have been extremely proud of our team over the Christmas period.
In the week leading up to and including Christmas 2021 we managed around 900 cases through our Shropshire OOH services - this year (2022) the same week saw a little over 1400 cases managed through the same service. This is close to a 60% increase in activity and something we could never have expected to have seen when we started to consider our Christmas rotas several months ago.
To give you an idea of what happened in December, a typical Bank Holiday week for Shropdoc does not go over 1,100 cases. This year, from the middle of November all through December, there wasn’t a single week where we saw less than 1,100 patients, despite them being “normal” weeks. Every week in December this year sits at the top of the 10 busiest weeks Shropdoc has had in the last two years - and this includes some of the latter stages of the CV-19 pandemic, and through recent covid peaks such as April 2022.
Our activity in Powys did not follow such a stark change, however we did see an increase at between 2-5% across the period. From a numbers perspective, we saw 321 the week leading to Christmas and 498 the week between Christmas and new year.
I would like to say a personal thank you to all of the teams here at Shropdoc for their commitment and effort over the past few months.
Helping our Communities
Our team continues to be one that makes such a difference to those around us and across the communities that we work with, and beyond.
I am always inspired when I hear of the great impact people across Shropdoc make to others with volunteering, fundraising and charitable work.
Urgent Care Practitioner Sian Wood was the driving force behind a 24-hour Team Endurance Challenge at Shrewsbury Town Football Club in December raising money for the Anthony Nolan Trust.
Sian’s efforts came after a friend was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and after managing to bring teams together to ski a total of 461,254 metres, the equivalent of 13.6 times across the channel, more than £3,000 was raised.
Shropdoc driver Mal has also made a huge difference with his volunteer work for Operation Sabre, a Shropshire-based charity committed to providing much-needed aid to Transylvania and surrounding areas in Romania.
In a recent trip to Romania Mal, along with other volunteers, handed out 380 Christmas gift packs to Ukranian refugees, residents of an elderly people’s home, a special needs home and a home for young mums.
Their work over there also included installing fire alarms and presenting a transit van to meet the needs of The Red Cross.
The CHECK Campaign - supporting each other
As a health provider supporting people across Shropshire and Mid Wales we are dedicated to finding ways to engage and connect with the communities that we service across our rural area.
Part of our commitment towards achieving this goal has been the launch of the CHECK campaign shortly before Christmas. The campaign urges everyone to check on their neighbours and community - as well as friends, family and work colleagues - to ensure a support network.
The CHECK campaign focuses on Care for the people around you, Helping anyone that may need assistance, understanding that Everyone can provide support, be Consistent in their checks and Keep communities running.
We will continue to build on the campaign throughout 2023.
Social Enterprise Trust Mark
We have once again gained the Social Enterprise Mark accreditation and will now be working towards the GOLD Trust Mark over the coming months.
The Social Enterprise Gold Mark is a prestigious accolade, which demonstrates our organisation has been through a rigorous external assessment process to achieve a recognised social enterprise quality standard.
It offers enhanced accreditation to social enterprises which can show best practice across several key business areas:
Governance
Stakeholder engagement
Business ethics
Financial transparency
Social impact
Armed Forces Covenant
Shropdoc has signed the Armed Forces Covenant as part of our commitment to the Armed Forces Community.
As part of this we will endeavour to uphold the key principles of the Armed Forces Covenant and work to demonstrate our commitment with a number of initiatives and improvements in how we hold information and identify potential barriers:
We will also continue to support our staff who are members of the reserve forces, supporting any mobilisations and actively encouraging membership of the reserved forces from within our workforce.
The Kindness Awards
Kindness is one of our core values, the values which underpin everything we do as an organisation, so in November we celebrated a whole week of kindness following World Kindness Day on November 13th.
As well as foodbank and animal shelter donations and random acts of kindness within our offices, we also launched the Kindness Awards and it was humbling to see and read the nominations as they poured in.
So many kindness nominations were submitted thanking colleagues for going above and beyond when it was needed most and it was a pleasure to give recognition to all of those nominated, and present so many Kindness Award certificates.
Organisational Development
I mentioned in my previous blog that as our business and the technological world around us rapidly changes we must ensure that we invest to adapt and respond to meet the needs of our patients, customers and our people.
I explained that we had completed a robust procurement process in order to identify and contract an external specialist Managed Service Provider (MSP).
I am pleased to announce that the EBC Group has been successfully appointed to deliver an effective network management service for Shropdoc.
EBC Group is an award-winning managed IT service provider that has been providing technology solutions to businesses and organisations for over 30 years to reduce their downtime and keep them running efficiently at all levels of their operations.
We look forward to working with them to plan, implement and support our future IT and technology and enable us as an organisation to run smoothly and securely.
Expanding the team
Our employees are our most important asset and we have continued to welcome new members of staff to the Organisation over the last few months.
These have included Katie Mulliner who has taken up the role of Deputy Head of Operations, Kevin Sleeman, our new Head of IT and Melissa Bowdler, who joins us as Finance Manager.
I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of those who have joined us over the past few months and look forward to seeing our team continue to grow in 2023.
Health & Wellbeing
Health and Wellbeing continues to be a focus for us here at Shropdoc and 2023 will see the continuation of our aim to create a healthier and more inclusive culture with improved work-life balance for you all.
It is extremely important to us that our staff feel supported and that we create a happy and productive working environment for our teams across the board.
Shropdoc Shufflers
The Shropdoc Shufflers will be making the effort to walk every month in 2023 and we will be making it accessible to all our staff by planning long and short walks, suitable for all capabilities - and four-legged friends are welcome to join in.
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