8/8/2019 One Message November 2010

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 This month marks the 30th anniversary

of St George’s moving to Tooting and an

official opening by the Queen. Although

the history of St George’s stretches back over 270 years; the last three decades

have seen both the trust and university

become very much part of the fabric of 

life in southwest London. The hospital site

has developed significantly since 1980. The

Jenner Wing was added in 1984, St James

Wing in 1988 and in 2003 the Atkinson

Morley Wing was opened.

 The trust’s specialist services have

also expanded in that time to include

neurosciences and trauma, stroke, cancer,renal, paediatrics and cardiothoracic care.

At the same time our community services,

providing vital care to local patients,

have continued to develop most recently

through integration with Community

Services Wandsworth.

1980 was also the year when the popular

BBC sitcom Citizen Smith came to an end.

 The show was written by John Sullivan, who

went on to write Only Fools and Horses. It

starred a young Robert Lindsay as “Wolfie”Smith, an urban revolutionary living in

 Tooting and self-proclaimed leader of the

 Tooting Popular Front, the goals of which

were “Power to the People” and “Freedom

for Tooting”.

Revolutionising careMany colleagues will already know that at

St George’s Healthcare we have our own

goals which are designed to revolutionise

the care that we deliver to our patients.Our stated mission is to improve the health

of our patients and our local community

by achieving excellence in clinical care,

research, education and employment.

Our values of excellent, kind, responsible

and respectful have been designed to help

staff work to achieve this mission. Eagle-

eyed readers may have noticed that in

this issue of One Message we have addedspecial logos to help reinforce our values.

 These values logos first appeared in the

October issue of the gazette and colleagues

will be seeing more of them around the

trust in the months to come.

I know that many of you already live our

values each and every day that you come in

to work. This dedication was reflected at the

annual Staff Achievement and Long Service

Awards dinner which I attended recently;

it is one event of the year that I alwayslook forward to and provides a chance to

celebrate the contribution of our staff.

 There are examples across the organisation

of where we are delivering against our

values so let me give you just a few:

Excellent – a national audit has rated our

stroke services the best in the country.

Over 200 trusts in England, Wales and

Northern Ireland were assessed across

eight categories and the stroke service at StGeorge’s achieved the highest overall score.

Kind – we are very fortunate to have a team

of dedicated volunteers who, under the

leadership of Susan Taleghany, give of their

own free time to help staff and patients

across the trust.

Responsible – the trust has signed up to

the ’10:10 Climate Change Campaign’ and is

committed to cutting its carbon emissions

by at least 10% during 2010. This builds onwork we have previously done under the

Think Green banner and has reinvigorated

our environmental aims under the banner

of Saving Carbon, Saving Lives.

Respectful – The One Team, a joint

 The Tooting connection

from the chief executive November 2010

Dear colleague,

One Message

Our values 

8/8/2019 One Message November 2010

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partnership project between the trust and

Staff Side, is an innovative programme of 

activity aimed at developing a culture of 

improvement among staff in bands one to

four.

It’s time for everyone to play theirpartHistory will show that 2010/11 were the

years that set the future course for St

George’s Healthcare. The recent integration

with Community Services Wandsworth

together with our plans to become a

foundation trust have the potential to

ensure an exciting long-term future of the

trust.

However, we cannot afford to take our

future for granted given the current

economic environment. The coalition

government’s spending review, unveiled

last month, shows that the NHS budget in

England will rise year-on-year by 0.4 per

cent in real terms to 2014-15. To put this

into perspective the average rise in NHS

spending each year since 1948 has been

five per cent.

Against this financial background it is vitalwe work to meet the trust’s cost reduction

programme (CRP) of £42 million. Some of 

the CRPs that we had set out at the start

of the 2010/11 financial year have already

slipped behind their original start date and

we are a long way from hitting our targets.

If we fail to deliver on our CRPs then our

plans to become a FT in 2011 will become

almost impossible to sustain.

 Therefore, it is imperative that in the second

half of this financial year that we all focus

our efforts to ensure that the trust’s CRPs

are achieved. This will be important for all

our projects from the large-scale electronic

rostering programme to those smaller

schemes which are being managed within

individual directorates.

I cannot stress strongly enough how

important our financial stability is to the

future of St George’s. Failure to become

a FT will almost certainly result in St

George’s Healthcare being integrated into

another trust, putting services and jobs

at risk. I know that these comments will

cause unease among many of you but

they should not come as a surprise. The

importance of our financial position has

been a consistent theme of my messages

to staff throughout 2010. However, I amconfident that colleagues across the trust

will play their full part in helping to ensure

that we achieve our objectives.

With this spirit of togetherness in mind I

would like to reflect on the recent passing

of Theodore C Sorensen, the former aide

to President John F Kennedy. His death

came close to the 50th anniversary of the

election of Kennedy as president of the

United States and a speech that remains

famous for its call for self-sacrifice and civicengagement. I am sure that colleagues will

all be familiar with one famous line from

this speech. I have adapted this for the trust

in these challenging times and feel it is

an appropriate note on which to end. The

message is a simple one: Ask not what St

George’s can do for you, ask what you can

do for St George’s.

 

Regards

David Astley

Chief executive

Our values Our values