Computer generated transcript

Warning!
The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.

politician in Northern Ireland. He wears that lightly. And Robin, it might not last, but while it lasts, um, I'd like to welcome you up, uh, to hear your thoughts As minister of health. You're very welcome. And it is very good to see you. The minister, Robin Swan. Thank you, Mark, For, uh, for them, for the introduction and in regards to being the most popular politician. I'm sure you'll do your best to correct that. Good morning, everyone. And first of all, can I start by thinking Michael, for for his kind introduction and his words of welcome here as well. Mark has mentioned the the current political situation that we we see ourselves and we find ourselves in here in Northern Ireland. Michael talked about this conference being one of the positive positivity and vision and driving innovation. So I'll stick to the health service rather than talking about politics and Northern Ireland. But as Marcus said, I may have a few words later this evening. So, Michael, thank you for your your introduction and healthier for you and your team for organizing such a fantastic conference. Already the buzz with in the room is Michael referred to, I think, his testimony to the enthusiasm that is still within our health service. It's a pleasure for me to be involved with this event once again, and I'm I'm sure, like me. You're delighted that we are able once again to hold it in person. And it's this year's conference, the theme of Of recognition, ambition and mobilization. And I believe that thing certainly sets alongside the agenda that I have set for my department in regards to rebuilding and improving our health and social care system over the next five years and beyond. But I want to take this opportunity to thank our workforce across our health and social care system, for it's your unwavering commitment to our whole societies. Well being that is a testimony that we are where we currently are, because the resilience that you demonstrate and have demonstrated in adapting to new ways of working at an unimaginable piece is to be commended, and I want to thank you. I want to thank you for your sacrifice is that you have made to ensure that those that you serve that we serve our front and center and all that you do so reflecting on your conference themes. I want to praise the work of our health and social care staff and not only rebuilding our capacity to deliver those critical services, but also, and second, to improve those services. And I think that's particularly true of are elective procedures in the recovery work where we have long waiting lists that actually impact so much on people's daily lives. With your dedication and focus, we're beginning to see not only activities increasing but also bringing on board those new initiatives. And I've always been consistent. And I've always pushed across my department on health and social care that we should celebrate or wins no matter how large they are, because we need to always reinforce that positive message. One such improvement, um, that I want to make today and announced today is that I am now able to announce that Daisy Hill Hospital in your E will join the Matter Hospital in Belfast as our regions second elective overnight stay center and that will care for patients who require that overnight stay in the hospital after surgery. That's another step in my commitment in the review of general surgery that we published earlier this year because that review spells out the challenges of the current configuration of our services across Northern Ireland. But I believe it also acts as that positive building block for the wider transformation of our entire health and social care system. Are elective care centers will provide a dedicated resource for those less complex plan surgeries. They will be part of a wider healthcare reform initiative actually involving those dedicated hubs for planned surgeries and procedures. And their aim is to enhance the quality and the consistent consistency of care, improve our productivity and help bring down our waiting lists. In this post on this tenure, I've always been clear that transformation, and indeed reconfiguration is required to drive sustainability and also to improve our capacity and that we will continue to need every square inch of capacity in each of our hospitals. So today's announcement on days a hill actually underlines that commitment and as an elective overnight stay center that provides elective care not just for the local population but also for the region days, A hill hospital will now be a critical part of Northern Ireland's elective network. Surgeons and patients alike will travel to the hospital from across Northern Ireland, but as well. I'm looking forward to the rebuild of our integrated care system. And as we look forward to that, our focus has to be on how we better plan, how we better deliver our services to meet the challenges facing our system and our population both day and daily. We have all seen everyone in this room has seen the devastating impact of health inequalities on our population on the services that we provide. But we've also seen that agility. We've seen that innovation and most importantly, we have seen that collaboration. But the challenges have not been helped by the way our system is currently shaped. We cannot. We simply cannot continue to operate in the same way because it's simply won't work. But the transformation journey can not only can only be about how or where we deliver services, but how we plan them. So learning from you and your experiences has actually brought us, I believe, to where we want to be. And that is a system that works as one system, a system that is actually underpinned by collaboration and integration, a system that makes the best use of available resources and the system that delivers what we want, what we want to improve the health and wellbeing of our population. That's the journey on which we have embarked building an integrated care system for Northern Ireland. So we must harness those many strengths. Those strengths that lie within our health and social care sector and that includes that includes our partners in the Voltaren community sector. It involves our partners in local government and it involves our partners who are service users and cares. And it's that model that will actually ensure that the right people are working in partnership, much more effectively maximizing that potential across the entire day of our system. I will provide that real opportunity, not real opportunity to develop how we assess our populations needs ensuring what we do is needed and delivered in the best way possible. And we've already seen progress in that area. Last week, I announced the launch of our regional mental health service, which will be an integral element of the new integrated care system that new service embodies and embodies. I believe the partnership approach, which will actually ensure people across the north across Northern Ireland will have that equitable access to high quality, regionally consistent but locally based mental health services. So continue your journey of transformation. I'd actually like to share with you an example of quality improvement. The recently developed health and social care Quality Improvement strategy 2022 24. It's called Moving Forward. Shaping the journey It's vision is to inspire and influence Northern Ireland's health and social care community to become a global leader in quality improvement in innovation by working together and focusing on that person's centered care and an example of that work is already underway. It's linked to the priority of improving timely access to safe care, actually harvesting the learning from teams who are delivering the best practice across our system with the name to deliver prototypes for system wide scale and spread. And today I'm proud to share that eight outstanding teams will be presented with this year's Quality improvement awards, and I want to commend and thank each team for the work that they and the other finalists undertake, actually focusing on improving care driven by and driven by compassion for people. And that's how we look ahead to a brighter, more improved future. I'm also delighted to announce the publication of my department's advanced care planning for now and for the future. That policy is for for adults in Northern Ireland. In the policy is about people. It's about people having the opportunity to have those conversations with those important to them and those providing care, that conversation, to make their wishes known, to make their feelings, their beliefs and their values, and to make their choices that reflect those. This is the first step on a road that I hope will lead to more people having the opportunity to reflect and talk about what matters to them, what they would prioritize in the future should they become unable to make decisions for themselves but to make those timely, realistic and practical plans for their future. You'll hear more about that work at the breakfast fringe station tomorrow morning, where I would encourage everyone to engage as it's something that does involve all of us. So what? We must look for long term actions, those long term reactions to address the significant pressures that are facing the delivery of health and social care services. We also need to look for those short, medium term measures that will help us build actually build sustainable and high quality services for the future. Evidence has shown us that where healthcare system's have leveraged digital well, there has been a rabbit enabler of, of efficiencies and improvements. And again, my department has been working to develop a new strategic direction, a direction that will ensure that we make the most of this opportunity to improve services and to create better outcomes for the people of Northern Ireland and their staff. And it's a health and social care digital strategy that will make the delivery of healthcare services more efficient and help to reduce delays and waiting lists. It will make the jobs of our health and social care staff easier by creating those joined up systems which will store information in the same place and not enabling effective care decisions to be made both quickly and easily so for patients for clients and carers, this will mean the delivery of more consistent and reliable service is enabling them to have greater control over their own health and care, as well as better ways to communicate with those who provide those services for them. So it's achieving. This is a process. It's a journey and it involves a change in culture in our sector because the people of Northern Ireland actually deserve a modern and convenient experience from health on social care, and they are at least as good as those in other industries and then other sectors. So the encompass program in the wider digital investment portfolio will be our way of bringing that into practice. That includes the developments which may help detect earlier signs of common and serious conditions such as heart disease, respiratory disease, diabetes and cancer. Earlier detection and management, along with much improved monitoring outside of hospitals and clinics, could potentially transform the provision of health and social care because it's a digital strategy that will chart a course to enable such developments to be identified and implemented within our system, and I will be encouraging my officials to ensure that this work is taken forward again as a priority. But to implement successful and meaningful change, we need a strong, unreliable workforce, so the growth and development of our workforce has been a pre priority for me in my department. I'm providing that focus to the aspirations of our workforce. It was in May 2018 that we published the Health and Social Care Workforce Strategy 2026 delivering for people with a name that by 2026 we meet our workforce needs and the needs of our workforce. On the 15th of June this year, I lost the Strategies second Action Plan that provided that updated and refresh direction of travel for the next three years. But we know that the challenge of ensuring that transformed health and social care service must have the right numbers of appropriately trained staff with the right skills mix under the department and employers provide conditions that make us an employer and the trainer of choice and be multifaceted. It requires additional sustained investment because that's needed to grow our local workforce to develop those opportunities to provide alternative pathways into a career in health and social care, but also to ensure that the growth of our workforce is supported through other avenues of recruitment, and that includes those available internationally. But I'm also mindful that we need to ensure the needs of our existing workforce are fully met, and the workforce strategy contains a range of accidents actually aimed at improving staff health, improving staff well being and improving staff safety at work. And it has that specific focus on addressing the issues of retention because we must deliver that agenda alongside a meaningful and wrist stained and sustained reduction in the level of expenditure and agency and Logan staff over the next three years. I want to set it clearly and say clearly to those agencies who provide temporary staffing to the health and social care that one of my keep priorities is to eliminate the use of framework agency usage and actually harness a new collaborative way of working with on contract agencies. Because our of contract expenditure is not sustainable. It's not a cost effective use of taxpayers money and can lead to a lag of work force continuity which has the potential to destabilise the safe care of our patients and destabilise our existing teams. So next week, our procurement and the Logistics service of our Business Services organization will actually launch a new public procurement and that will seek agencies to provide nursing and midwifery agency staff to your health and social care system. That procurement will close in November and the new framework will be put in place in the new year and my expectation is that those agencies which secure place will start providing services to health and social care by February next year, a second procurement will follow for the supply of medical and dental locum staff and there will be further work to see is the use of social workers employed by recruitment agencies and trusts. However, those financial pressures and budgetary uncertainty facing my department, we know we're unacceptable and they continue to seriously impede our ability to deliver the ambitions we have for our workforce and on the issue of finance, as has already been touched on. I'm on record as warning that the funding pressures in health maybe significant by the second half of this financial year, and that any financial budget settlement is unlikely to be sufficient to meet our needs. But as minister, I will continue to do the best that I can to deliver for the public with the resources that I have available on the time that I have left. So to live with in any likely budget settlement would require me to take forward unacceptable actions which would directly impact services to citizens and again I've been clear and remain clear that I will not be implementing those decisions giving the ongoing absence of an executive or indeed an agreed budget. There is a clear risk that we will soon reach the point where overspend cannot be prevented. And if we continue to take the required actions to deliver safe and effective health and social care services. We know that the ongoing political situation is also impacting on how we planned for future years. Consequently, there will not be funding for all that we want or need to do so. Therefore, we will need to focus on making the best use of the resources. We already have three greater levels of productivity and in closing I'm determined to do y'all icon to rebuild the healthcare system that is efficient and fit for purpose. And I'm confident that we can rely on each one of you to embark on this challenging journey with us on behalf of the people of Northern Ireland, because I firmly believe that together we will achieve more. Thank you