"My gratitude to staff doesn’t know end"
We spoke to Remi Odejinmi, medical director at Whipps Cross, about how things are going since she joined in the summer as well as the challenges and priorities for the hospital.
1. Hi Remi, would you like to briefly introduce yourself?
I joined the Whipps Cross family on 1 July as Medical Director and I’m also consultant anaesthetists. Before coming here, I spent more than 20 years working at BHRUT.
2. How are things going so far?
It’s all going very well, and I’ve had a very warm Barts Health welcome and even warmer Whipps cross welcome and I’ve been introduced to how we do things here - nothing is too difficult for us.
I’ve managed to visit about 50% of our estates including wards and outpatients areas and other clinical areas like ultrasound and of course I’ve been to the front door many times which is our ED. I’ve found staff to be resilient and to take hope and pride in what they do and provide the best care they can within the constrains they are working in.
Maternity as well where staff shortages are so heavy, but staff continue to give their all and my gratitude to staff doesn’t know end.
I’m also very fortunate to sit with the Senior leadership team, I’ve learned a lot in these three months about compassion and inclusion and I’m quite passionate about those areas and I feel the team works as one.
3. From your perspective, what are the biggest challenges that Whipps Cross is facing?
The challenges are that we are trying to provide the best quality care we can, with constrained workforce shortages and mental and physical wellbeing challenges where people feeling extremly tired, and the staff shortages have a bigger impact when people decide they don’t want to work full time and where the demand for care is so high.
We also coming into a further seasonal pressure, winter, which is going to cause immense demand on all our services, yet our people continue to deliver.
There are also the challenges of providing evidence to the CQC and other regulating bodies that we are doing are the best we can with what we’ve got.
There’s also the challenge of working in a hospital that is over 100 years old. Our infrastructure is tired so being able to keep the flag flying and reassuring people and give them confidence in telling them that this is not always what we have to do and being able to introduce new ways of working.
But also there is the challenge of working with the wider system so not just Barts Health but also primary care and community services so we know we have the challenge to get our patients out of the hospital and we also got the challenge of ensuring that is only patients that need to be in the hospital that are in here and that are seeing by the right people. That means we need to work with our external stakeholders including patient groups to ensure that the pathways that we create for our patients are sustainable for the next decade and the next decade.
4. Any particular priorities that you think we should be focussing on?
The biggest priority for us right now is preparing for winter and getting through winter with all the constraints that I talked about. What I would like in the long term is to have a fully engaged workforce that co-designs and creates pathways for our patients that are sustainable.
In the interim, we have to deal with our workforce challenges that means keeping ourselves healthy, making sure that our staff and eligible patients have their Covid-19 boosters and their flu vaccines too, also continue to follow the hygiene protocols that we have in place but also making sure they are checking in and making sure that we are leading with compassion and inclusion.
5. Is there anything in particular that you enjoy the most about being here at Whipps Cross?
It’s just getting around Whipps Cross and meeting the people, it’s almost as if there was a certain type of person that comes to work here, a person that says to you ‘I can do it and I’m bringing my whole self to work and I want to give my best’.
I work once a week in theatres and that is my safe space, my sanctuary, I absolutely love working there but on top of that, the cherry on the icing for me is being able to work around Whipps Cross hospital and meet people and I always get a warm welcome, people are so proud to talk about what they do and that just makes it worthwhile.
6. Talking about our patients and local communities, is there a message that you’d like to share with them?
I would say that we want our patients when they come in here to come in at the right time and be treated by the right person and if they don’t need to be here, to use alternative approaches to health care. We are working with primary care as well as within the community within the new integrated care system to ensure that we create and codesign with patients pathways that would allow them to access care in the right place and sometimes that can be outside the hospital.
Our hospital is like a repair shop, you come here when you are broken and we don’t want you broken, we want you to live healthily, we want people to be born well, live well and age well and means outside the hospital.
7. Is there anything else that you'd like to share?
I want to truly thank people, I spent more than 20 years at BHRUT, and I don’t feel like a stranger here, I’ve been embraced very warmly and people have been really engaging.
This is resounding thank you and appreciation of all the work you do to make Whipps Cross the place that it is.