Monthly archives: March 2018
Aspiring to Excellence Performance Development Review – Attention all Managers
We are moving closer to the launch of our new cycle of aspiring to excellence PDR’s which will ensure that all employees have a new PDR between April and June 2018. To ensure the cycle runs smoothly and effectively and all of our employees receive their PDR please ensure all PDR’s are planned now and dates added to ESR by 19th March 2018.
To add your booked dates to ESR please see guidance http://myconnect.swbh.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Entering-Booked-Appraisal-Dates.pdf?x80812
If you require any further information please contact bethan.downing1@nhs.net
Hot Topics Team Brief taking place today
Hot Topics is our monthly Trust-wide team briefing led by the Chief Executive with sessions taking place at the start of each month at Rowley Regis Hospital, Sandwell General Hospital and City Hospital.
The next Hot Topics session is due to take place today (Tuesday 6 March) from 1pm in the Hayward Lecture Theatre, Post Graduate Centre, City Hospital.
SWBH Live with Dr Derek Connolly
Do you suffer from high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and/or obesity? Want to know how these conditions will have an impact on your heart and your general health?
We will be hosting a Facebook Live Q&A session with our expert, Consultant Interventional Cardiologist, Dr Derek Connolly on Wednesday 7 March at 10.30am.
He will be on hand to talk about these issues, and answer your questions about heart health. If you have any questions for him please e-mail anuji.evans@nhs.net and tune in on Wednesday, to hear his answers.
Purple Points went live last week
Our Purple Points went live last week at Sandwell, City and Rowley Regis Hospitals.
Working with Healthwatch Sandwell, the Purple Points are a new way that inpatients and their relatives can address concerns they have, whilst they are still being treated in hospital.
Patients and their loved ones can use the phone to call our Purple Point team and talk about any issues they may have, or they can compliment excellent care they have experienced.
If you receive a call from the Purple Point team about a concern, please respond so that they can start working on resolving the problems whilst the patient is still in our care.
It will be important to keep the person who made the call updated throughout the process and that we ensure issues are resolved whilst the patient is still in our care.
In getting this right, we will reduce complaints, responding to issues as they arise, resolving problems before they escalate.
It means we can make a difference at the time, rather than when they have gone home.
With your help we can get our care right, every time for everyone.
For more information click here.
Pensions department closed – 7 March
The pensions department will be closed on 7 March to phone calls and personal visits due to training. Normal service will resume on 8 March.
Rear car park at Rowley Regis Hospital
Please note that a new exit barrier is being installed to the rear car park at Rowley Hospital this week.
The car park can still be accessed by the rear side barrier as normal, but please exit using the same route you entered by, as there is no means of exit the other way until the new barrier is installed and commissioned.
Measles, Mumps and Rubella awareness month
Calling all midwives,nurses, maternity healthcare support workers and all other colleagues who work in the maternity and neonatal unit at City Hospital, Sandwell Hospital and in the community.
Measles is no longer a virus of the past. FIVE outbreaks of measles have occurred in December 2017 (out of season) alone in England. Occupational health will be having a ‘pop up’ clinic in City Maternity Department on Wednesday 7 March.
The occupational health nurses will be able to access occupational health records to check MMR status and will also be able to administer MMR vaccinations.
The MMR ‘pop up’ clinics will be in the antenatal clinic at City Hospital between 9am-12noon and in the discharge lounge (outside ADAU) from 12.30pm and 4pm.
Any colleague can contact occupational health and wellbeing service on extension 3306 to check their MMR status and book an appointment if necessary.
IT failure – 2 March
We operate our IT services from a number of locations including a data centre in Sandwell. This is a purpose built room with air conditioning, fire and flood protection. The air conditioning is required as computers generate a lot of heat. On Friday 2 March, two of the three air conditioning units failed resulting in temperatures climbing in the data centre. As planned, our computers automatically shut down when the temperature reached 45 degrees in the room in order to protect them from damage. This meant that a large number of IT systems stopped being available.
Estates and informatics worked together to cool the room and restart the computers, with services restored over the course of Friday afternoon. No data was lost and full services were established by 5pm. The data centre cooling is now working and increased monitoring has been put in place.
We are investigating the root cause of the issue however the likely cause is a failure of the air conditioning units due to the very low temperatures experienced last week. If you have any IT issues please contact the service desk on extension 4050 and they will happy to resolve.
Charity bake sale
There is a bake sale on today (5 March) in the BTC, 1st floor, City Hospital which will raise funds for Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia Support Group.
Please do head along and support the event.
Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 2 March
The weather, and its impact on colleagues, patients, and our IT, dominates the end of this week and the weekend ahead. Thank you to everyone working so hard to manage a difficult situation. Today’s business continuity issue with technology is linked directly to the weather. Liam Kennedy and Caroline Rennalls are leading work this weekend to try and help, and we will all need to do our best to support each other, either directly through sharing 4x4s, or in cross covering where colleagues cannot get into work. There are lots of examples of fantastic team support across the Trust this week, and of course if you can think of anything that would help please speak up.
On Wednesday, the Prime Minister made a very welcome statement to the House of Commons about Midland Met. The Trust’s twitter feed has the clip! She described what Tony Waite, Alan Kenny and I can see at first hand, which is everyone working very hard to try and get work restarted on site. We are beginning at the same time to finalise an assessment of the clinical and other risks that arise for us if we are not able to complete the new hospital in 2019/20, which you will recall is twelve months later than we had always intended, and said was necessary. The promise from the government of work restarting as soon as possible, also reiterates the certainty that the build work will happen and that we will in time move out of our current poor estate, and more vitally get to a clinical configuration which supports high quality seven day services. Of course if it does transpire that there is considerable delay around the work’s completion, then we will need to explore any interim moves of services between our sites. Right now that is not our plan, but during March it will become clear, and probably final, what our timescale will be. We are hopeful to having an interim construction contractor mobilised in coming weeks and that will be a welcome sign of progress.
Yesterday’s Board meeting also approved revised nursing establishments recommended by Elaine Newell and her team. These have been built up over many weeks based on our acuity audit work this winter. These revised establishments will be the basis of our rosters from the start of May. Within that approval we were able to invest further in ward supervisory time, tackle some hotspots around quality, and support a substantive peripatetic “HIT” team to manage roster gaps and focused care. Our relative financial stability allows us to make those choices, similarly to last year’s investment in an NIV unit or in a higher dependency surgical bed model. Of course that stability rests on continued efforts to bear down on our costs. Having halved agency spend this last year, we need to do so again in the months ahead. At the same time during March, we will implement changes for staff undertaking bank or agency shifts, which require a competency check at the start of work (bank/agency) and a performance assessment at the end (agency). Both will be a condition of payment, but the intention is nothing to do with money and everything to do with safety. We need to know the skills and confidence of the people working with us on our teams. These checks necessitate conversations which allow that to happen, and for someone coming on shift to ask for and get the support they need. That is true in any professional discipline, and we are especially keen to ensure that trainees and others working with us, especially those unfamiliar with our systems, are inducted before they start work.
It is now almost a full year since we were inspected by the Care Quality Commission. Much has moved on since, and my sense is that we continue to improve our safety culture. The implementation of further improvements around the identification of sepsis both in ED and in our wards remains a focus of work in coming weeks, as well as ensuring that our deprivation of liberty (DOLs) work is meeting expectations. Take a look at the new bright orange screensaver loaded up now on Sepsis, setting out some big and helpful changes in our approach effective immediately. Our latest round of In House Inspections take place in the week of March 12th to test our standards, on things like resus trolley equipping or medicines security, as well as to understand and hear feedback from staff and from patients. The launch of Purple Point this last week gives us another route through which to hear feedback, and it will be really important that we are all emphasising to patients and carers the ways in which they can get their compliments and concerns acted upon.
Finally I wanted to draw your attention to some upcoming matters to look out for in coming days:
- Hot Topics takes place again on Monday and Tuesday next week. From April the timing of the cascade will change as we align our messaging to the Clinical Leadership Executive each month – but the senior cascade will also become a mandatory attendance event, with a changed format focused on learning from excellence.
- You should have seen publicity around the temporary closure of the Hallam Restaurant to allow its upgrade. This is a great time to try the new ordering app and also to rely on our other outlets. See details in staff comms.
- Digital champion and early adopter training for Unity is going on right now. Do grab your opportunity to learn as we move towards deploying the new system this summer. I know I started this message with a reference to IT downtime, but we will have a more resilient network by April, and moving to Unity helps us further with much more cloud based storage. So let’s get ready for the warm weather and for change!
#hellomynameis….Toby
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