Chief executive update

December 2025

In this month's message, I want to focus on the challenges winter is already bringing for our Trust and our wider system.

Like many NHS trusts, we face a difficult period in the weeks leading up to the Christmas and New Year holiday. Flu cases are high and continuing to rise in all age groups and all parts of the country, adding an additional pressure in urgent and emergency care services that is being felt very directly in Birmingham's hospitals.

Our Urgent & Emergency Care and Winter Plan sets out the actions we are taking in community services working with GPs to play our part in the wider system response - actions designed to help keep people well at home, provide alternatives to hospital admission and support safe and early discharge. We expect we will need to do more to respond to extreme surges in demand. As part of this work, our care co-ordination teams in locality hubs, and effective hospital in-reach teams working closely with hospital colleagues, can make a difference.

As we focus on our role in the urgent and emergency care system, we recognise the need to take greater clinical risk in some services in order to reduce risk elsewhere and we have been working with our teams on ways in which we can take a greater share of the system-wide clinical risk as we manage winter together.

I am very grateful to everyone in Team BCHC for their response to these challenges. Given the pressures facing our system, including another strike by BMA resident doctors, it is really important that we continue to do all we can to play our part in the system response.

One area in which we can all make a direct difference is flu vaccinations. Flu cases are the direct cause of the emergency care pressures we face, and the vaccine is safe and effective. We continue to encourage colleagues to have their vaccination and similarly urge everyone eligible - vulnerable adults and all school-age children, to do the same. Protecting our patients, our colleagues, ourselves and our families is a way in which we can all help with the response to winter pressures.

We have also been working to pull together a set of actions to address unacceptably long waiting times in children's neurodevelopmental pathways in an overall programme plan for improvement, as well as continuing to develop our immediate enhanced programme of support .

Within the Birmingham and Solihull Community Care Collaborative , our focus has been on launching locality hubs and we are working with partners in mental health and adult social care to ensure they are able to be fully part of the multidisciplinary team. The roll out of the next 11 integrated neighbourhood teams also continues.

In intermediate care, we are working with adult social services partners on the redesign of care centre inpatient services and we were pleased that the announcements associated with the Budget included resource to redevelop Stockland Green and Summerfield health centres to support their future role as neighbourhood health centres. That integrated approach to care naturally extends to services for children and young people and we are pleased that Birmingham City Council has been allocated £16.6m to continue to develop Family Hubs up to 2029.

As this is my final Headlines update of 2025, can I finish by thanking you for your support and interest in the work of BCHC during the last 12 months and offering my very best wishes for the holiday period including Christmas, Hannukah and the New Year.

While it is an important time for reflection, for sharing moments with friends and family and, for many, celebration, it is certain to be an extremely busy period for people working the health and care sector. My thanks to all colleagues and partners who are working so hard during a period of extreme pressure.

So, whatever the coming days and weeks look like for you, may I wish you a very happy Christmas.