Chief executive update

January 2026

Welcome to my first Headlines message of 2026 and can I start by wishing everyone a very happy New Year. As every year, I am grateful to the many colleagues who have been working over the Christmas and New Year period, always a very busy period for our healthcare system.

I am writing this in the aftermath of Storm Goretti and the heavy snow that has fallen across the Midlands. It is some years since I can remember waking up to this much snow in Birmingham and I am grateful to colleagues for all their work to keep our patients and service users as safe and supported as possible.

I am pleased to report that that collective effort over several weeks also meant we progressed our key winter plan objectives in the run-up to Christmas and across the holiday period. We know that there is more to do and that pressure in emergency care pathways remains significant but we safely discharged patients onto Discharge to Assess pathways; strengthened admission avoidance thanks to the launch of a single point of access to community health and social care services; opened our winter inpatient ward at West Heath Hospital on schedule; and rolled out our in-reach model from our new locality hubs to all acute hospital sites.

Ensuring we continue to do all we can to support emergency care pathways remains, of course, a top operational priority for us for the first part of 2026.

The start of a year is always a good time to refocus on priorities for the months ahead. The first priority for us in Team BCHC is to keep a firm focus on emergency care and all the things that we were doing at the end of last year to help manage winter pressures. The first weeks of 2026 are likely to be as difficult as the final weeks of 2025.

So, particularly for those adult clinical services teams directly facing urgent and emergency care pathways, this remains our immediate priority.

Secondly, we will continue to work hard to deliver on the objectives we set out for March 2026 in our 2025/6 plan.  We are on course in many areas and I am grateful for the shared effort to get our financial position back on track, which I know has been challenging. We have asked leaders and line managers to focus particularly on colleagues' health and wellbeing to reduce sickness absence in the next few months.

Thirdly, we will be working with colleagues across the organisation to finalise a robust  medium-term plan for 2026/7 to 2028/9 that supports the delivery of our strategic objectives - delivery of safe, high-quality care; our commitment to be a great place to work; and development of integrated care along with our partners. ​

This includes, in particular, continuing to develop the locality and neighbourhood health approach and strengthen partnerships between general practice and community services. Meanwhile, in services for children and families, we  remain  committed to improving access to ASD and ADHD assessment and diagnosis and working with, in particular, Birmingham City Council to develop a new, integrated  universal pathway to meet the needs of all children and young people aged 0 to 19 years.

As every month, a lot to update on. I hope the above summary is helpful and please do get in touch if  there is  anything you would like to discuss.

Best wishes,  
Richard