News

 

Hello Team Derian, please find a brief below an update from across the Hospice……

 

1. Our new Children & Family Advocate and Engagement Lead, Natalie, has settled into Team Derian. Thank you to those of you who have met up with Natalie and made her feel welcome. She is currently working her way round the teams, meeting as many people as possible to build up a picture of the services we offer and all of our touchpoints with families. She will be looking at everything we do to engage with our families – from referral to discharge – and will be helping us to ensure that their voices are being heard in everything we do. Natalie will be joined by Ionie, our Children & Family Advocate and Engagement worker in early June. These roles will be vital in ensuring that we put our families at the heart of all decisions, and that we can co-design services in the future.  Natalie and Ionie will play a key role in our next Strategic Needs Assessment which will help develop the services for the future.  These roles were directly requested by the board of trustees and set us apart from the rest of the hospice world. It is important that these roles are independent to service delivery and as such sit within our Engagement structure under Caroline. Welcome to the team.

 

2. We now have a new graphic designer in post. Welcome to Kathryn who started work last week. She is now available to receive your graphic design requests.

 

3. Have you seen our recent TV advert? Holly’s Story is now running on ITV Granada, encouraging people to leave a gift to us in their Wills. Thank you to Holly’s family for letting us tell the story of their special girl. If you haven’t seen, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFJe7u-ywSE&feature=youtu.be

 

4. Bridget Thomas, our new Deputy Clinical Director has hit the ground running this week.  Bridget helped to deliver training during our standards re-set week, and has now started in earnest and is spending her first few weeks getting to know Team Derian and reviewing all of our policies and procedures to support our teams to deliver outstanding and safe care.

 

5. A small group of staff represented Derian House at a £1million celebration dinner held by Together for Cinema, the charity who donated our £100,000 cinema room back in 2019, and reported that the quality of our cinema room is one of the best of all children’s hospices across the UK.

 

6. It’s pay day (yay!) and you should all have your 3% increase back-dated from April. Thanks to the finance team for the extra work they’ve put in this month to ensure this has happened smoothly.

 

7. In terms of statutory funding, we are clear on the funding from L&SC for this financial year.  It is less than last year due to many matched funding pots no longer existing.  GM continues to be difficult to navigate however we will get there I am sure.

 

8. As many of you will know Ruth will be leaving the team over the summer and therefore we are now out to advertisement for her successor.

 

9. In addition to the roles mentioned above we’re busy on the recruitment front with the following colleagues having recently joined or arriving very soon !

 

• Ken Whalen – Facilities
• Heather Skinner – Care Team
• Alice Whaley –  Care Team
• Dorota Rebis-Witkowska – Care Team
• Nicola Grindley – Cook
• Vicki Boe – Temporary Finance Officer
• Samantha Oakes – Care Team
• Emma McClymont – Care Team

 

• Thank you to those of you who expressed an interest in supporting Kim with designing our new staff engagement survey.  There are 11 of team Derian involved and they’ll be getting together very soon to redesign the survey to be more bespoke to our needs.

 

• Managers embraced a half day training session this week on Employment Law.  The session was delivered by Employment Lawyer John Hassalls who provides legal advice on more complex HR matters.  Feedback on the session has been wholly positive, and we’ll be providing more development for managers around HR in the coming months.

 

Finally, thank you for your continued hard work and I hope that you have a well-earned break over the Bank Holiday (for those of you who are not on shift).

 

Take care everyone

 

Best wishes   Karen   Karen Edwards OBE Chief Executive Officer