Monthly archives: July 2018

Trust achieves Silver at TIDE Awards

We have achieved a silver award at this year’s ENEI TIDE Awards for our excellent E, D&I practices.

The ENEI are a national organisation who benchmark public and private sector organisations in terms of their diversity and inclusion.

We have attained a ‘Silver’ rating in our first year, which is great news and testament to the efforts of everyone within the organisation.

Heartbeat – Nursing recruitment event success

A recruitment event held at Sandwell Hospital has been hailed a success after more than 40 conditional job offers were handed out on the day.

An estimated 100 visitors came to the jobs fair, held at the Education Centre on 23 June, and were left overwhelmed with the warm welcome from our nursing teams.

Qualified nurse Shelly Hubbard, who was offered a job on the spot following her successful interview, said: “When I saw the advert for the recruitment event, I did not hesitate in applying.

“The Trust has a great reputation, especially when it comes to the extensive support it offers for nurses.

“So when I came to the event, I knew instantly that I had made the right decision. Everyone was so welcoming, friendly and cheerful. I felt like I was already part of the organisation. I think the event was well organised and from my experience of visiting other trusts’ recruitment events, this is the best one.

“I’m really glad that I was able to secure the offer and I can’t wait to join the organisation.”

Paul Hooton, Deputy Chief Nurse, said: “The recruitment event was very successful. The majority of people who came on the day were appointable and we are very pleased they will be joining our nursing team.

“In September, we will be welcoming more than 50 newly qualified nurses to our organisation.

“With the success from recent recruitment activities, we expect to fill up all vacancies soon, ensuring safe staffing levels and the best patient care possible.

“I would like to express my gratitude to all the teams involved in making the event successful. Every one of them went the extra mile to make sure we recruited the best nurses for our organisation. This is truly a team effort.”

Iceland 10 percent discount for NHS employees

Iceland are offering 10 percent discount to all NHS employees who spend a minimum of £40.

To redeem this special offer please visit www.iceland.co.uk/emergency-services

For more information please contact amir.ali1@nhs.net.

Sandwell Valley youth festival: 14 July

Sandwell’s annual youth festival comes to Sandwell Valley Country Park on Saturday 14 July.

The SHAPE youth festival will include live music, a climbing wall, zorb football, graffiti art, a UV silent disco, photobooth and a junior funfair.

There will be performances from the finalists of the SHAPE Your Talent 2018 competition, plus other local artists including cultural acts such as Polish dancers and a bhangra smash up band.

For tickets and information please visit www.sandwell.gov.uk/SHAPEevents

Filipino Fiesta 2018

Our BME & LGBT Staff Networks, along with our Trust Volunteer Team and Trust Charity enjoyed a weekend in the sunshine last weekend supporting the Birmingham, Sandwell and West Midlands Filipino Fiesta 2018.

This colourful celebration was organised by the local Filipino community and showcases the food, culture and passions of the Filipino community, many of whom work within the NHS and the wider Health and Social Care Sector.

Stuart Young Head of Diversity and Inclusion & Chair of the LGBT Staff Network said “We are proud to have supported this important community event, our collective presence from across the Trust demonstrates how much we value our Filipino colleagues and the genuine desire to engage with the community we deliver health care to”

Over the two days some one hundred people appeared on the stage, with dance performances, recitals, poetry, singing acts and a collective worship event. The event was an opportunity for the community to raise awareness of the Filipino culture.

Donna Mighty Co-Chair of the BME Staff Network said “As a network we are proud to support Fiesta for the second year running, we have a richly diverse population as we value being part of this community event and engaging with out Filipino family”.

The Staff Networks and SWBH NHS Trust are proud to have sponsored and been in attendance at this event and would like to thank the community for the warm welcome and the wonderful entertainment and food  – we are looking forward to next years event.  Salamat

Windrush drop-in session with Shabana Mahmood MP: 13 July

Shabana Mahmood MP, in conjunction with the Refuge Migrant Centre (RMC) in Birmingham, will be hosting special Drop-in Surgery for people living in Sandwell and West Birmingham linked to the Windrush generation on Friday 13 July.

For more information, please contact robyna.mian@parliament.uk or call 0121 661 9440.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 6 July

A huge thank you to Unison, and to our communication and charity teams for their work getting 70th birthday celebration events in place for yesterday.  The sun came out, people fell safely off a bucking bronco, and there was chance to have fun and reminisce.  At Sandwell the old photograph exhibition began its tour, and some of our nurses were part of a before/after photo in front of Headquarters, which I am sure will make its way into Heartbeat.  I hope you had chance to take part.  I spent time delivering birthday cards to some of our patients, and saw first hand the challenges to keeping patients hydrated and cool in the current heatwave.  Of course a modern hospital might make that easier!

We are expecting in November to see a new NHS plan come forward, on the back of the funding settlement Theresa May announced a few days ago.  We know that the pay award will be funded and should be in pay packets this July.  Beyond that the content of the plan are uncertain.  However, my sense is that there will be considerable continuity of vision.  By that I mean a continued drive to help organisations to work together.  And a continued push to connect primary care, mental health services and hospital care.  I would expect to see a big acceleration in efforts to replace traditional face to face in situ outpatient models.  And I hope we will see some real action on long term care for older people.  We know we can only succeed with care home partners, and with local authority partners, and alongside third sector.  I guess my point is that our 2020 vision, and what comes next working as a system across western Birmingham and Sandwell is very likely to be exactly what the national process demands of the NHS as a whole.

The future of the NHS is not in doubt as an institution.  But as look forward to our 100th birthday we do need to be thoughtful about what we do, what we might do less of, and particularly how doing more work preventatively could tackle the underlying causes of ill health.  That has to start with the very youngest children.  And needs a particular and thoughtful response to frailty and to patients at the end of their life.  In some local partnership right now we are seeing the emergence of emphasis on the first 1,000 days of life, and perhaps on the last thousand too.  The biggest single public health challenge locally remains obesity, especially in younger children. We have work to do to see our place in a joined up plan for that.

Where we do have a plan of course is around alcohol.  I was delighted that Arlene Copland from our liaison team was one of our colleagues going to the NHS 70th celebrations in York Minster, whilst Caroline Rennalls and Nuhu Usman led our delegation to Westminster Abbey.  Arlene and Sally Bradberry have been doing great work to join up our services for patients with alcohol problems.  Meanwhile we continue to work with the council to see if we can find a route to minimum unit pricing for alcohol locally – we know it works, even if it is unpopular!

Talking of efficacy and popularity, yesterday I wrote to everyone in the Trust about the birthday news on smoking. From 5 July 2019, all SWBH sites will go smoke free – after yesterday’s Trust Board meeting at the Yemeni community centre in West Bromwich. The shelters will be removed and we will be encouraging vaping in our grounds, but not in our doorways. Patients will be offered nicotine replacement therapy and other interventions on arrival.  But visitors, patients or colleagues who smoke on our grounds will be subject to a fine. We have twelve months to be ready. I would ask for your ideas and your support. There is no point going smoke free to sound well meaning.  Even at 70 years old quitting smoking helps. And we intend to be properly smoke free. It’s a big change and we have come to it after several years of putting it off. Please work with us.

The NHS, and the Trust, has a future to look forward to and celebrate. But to be doing that for a long time, and handing on this institution to others in decades ahead, we have to move more quickly to address harms that drive disease. When we get Unity in, we will be focusing hard on Making Every Contact Count. While we plan for that, do think through what information, help or ideas you need to develop the public health and health advisory nature of your service – seeing contact with one specialty or team as an opportunity to look at the wider health needs, physical or psychological, of the patients and communities we serve.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 29 June

The deadline for Star Award nominations is today! Although if you want to submit over the weekend we will still take your form. Meanwhile, Joy Walker – senior sister on D26 – is down to the last ten on the short list for Nursing Leader of the Year in the Nursing Times Awards. Huge congratulations to Joy, and to her team. They have been winning prizes within our consistency of care process, and I know that our elderly care ward cluster are starting to stand out for the quality of care they are able to provide. That said, like all our hospital wards, we have work to do this summer on sepsis care – and during July we will have data available on the timeliness of our risk assessments and responsiveness. You will remember, I am sure, that improving Sepsis care is our number one quality priority this year as we look to prevent avoidable deaths and harm. The Trust has above expectation mortality rates right now, and this is the biggest step we can take to address that. More importantly, it’s just the right thing to do.

The delivery of our safety plan, and now our quality plan, and the Consistency of Care programme too, have been grounded in work listening to your ideas and views. This coming Wednesday we have the first of a series of Listening Into Action events with staff across our Emergency Departments to see what we can do better to improve staff experience and patient care. You may remember from previous Friday messages that on key safety measures our EDs have dramatically improved since February – measures like pain review and VIP chart completion. But we all also know that wait times for care are far far too long – in the bottom ten in the NHS right now. Changing this is, of course, a whole Trust project. So our iCares team will be diverting some ambulance conveyances to their service, and we are changing – from Monday -pathways between ED and orthopaedics. Your ideas on what would help deliver shorter waits are welcome.

Congratulations to our maternity team, and especially to our infant feeding team Louise Thompson, Kristy Dunning, Kirsty Hall and Carmen Nuttall for supporting the wider teams to attain our successful breastfeeding re-accreditation. In terms of public health and life chances we know we want to support mothers to breastfeed. Again, this is a whole Trust project, and if we do admit someone to one of our general wards who is still breastfeeding we must support that, using ward fridges, like someone would at home. It was a patient story at our Board that first highlighted some of the ways in which our ways of working stood in the way of breastfeeding among our patients, and it must be common sense for us all to help support the aims our maternity team are leading.

Congratulations too to our colleagues at the Royal Wolverhampton, who have been rated good by the CQC. That is precisely our aim for later this year, and if we can maintain our standing in most services and drive up standards in medicine and emergency care then we can do it! A good rating is what your hard work deserves and what our patients deserve. So if you can see weaknesses in care please raise them, Speak Up, and let’s try together to make the best of what we already do our norm. That of course applies “in” and “out of” hours. My thanks to our senior nursing team for last week’s 4am visits. I know Paula has disseminated feedback on what worked well in our wards, and some points to change. Our uniform policy applies at night…

Our latest Team Talk video is out. During the start of the cascade, where all our senior leaders meet and talk for an hour, two issues came up a lot. Concern over the new continence pads and the training that has gone with that, which senior nurses will address over coming weeks, and issues about mandatory training recording and access. Bear in mind that in the PDR moderation in our Aspiring for Excellence project you cannot be rated 3 or 4 if you mandatory training is expired. If you have issues you feel are not being addressed do highlight them to Bethan Downing. We are over 90% compliant with mandatory training right now, so join the club.

This month is the NHS’ 70th birthday, with Thursday marked the big day itself. Linked to this message are details of how we are celebrating, and you should too! This is the best health service in the world, at its best, and we should be proud of what we achieve. The Trust is rated Outstanding for caring by the CQC – and that matters very much indeed.

#hellomynameis….Toby

Eid Celebrations 2018

Ramadan this year was different to the countless that we have celebrated over the years at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust.

With the dedication of the MLG (Muslim Liaison Group), BME Staff Network and major help from Raffaela Goodby & Stuart Young we have engaged with many more colleagues from across the Trust.

In April we held an event in Sandwell to counteract the day off hate to have a day of love, this was the spring board to this years activities around Ramadan.

With help and support from the Diversity and Inclusion Team and Internal Communications we launched our Ramadan Awareness Month on Connect, highlighting members of the Islamic Community from across history, modern life and from across the Trust.

We held our first ever Iftar at City Hospital to break our fast with everyone partaking  Muslims and non-Muslims. This was hosted by out Trust Chairman

At the end of Ramadan we celebrated Eid with our colleagues from across the Trust.

For Muslims Eid is an opportunity to reflect on the 30 days spent fasting and to recommit to values of gratitude, compassion, and generosity. Every year we celebrate with our SWBH family by having a day were we all come together regardless of our background to the Eid celebrations.

 This events always makes me reflect on our Trust’s values that are built by people of all backgrounds, and the difference we make to our colleagues and the patients we care for.

At the Eid Celebration we had many volunteers from different background helping which we are majorly thankful for, it’s our trust values and strength that bring us together to stand in solidarity and protect one another from intolerance and negative actions, thereby making our SWBH a great place to work.

Submitted by Anser Khan Co-Chair of the SWBH BME Staff Network
and Member of the MLG (Muslim Liaison Group)

CDA letters users to be discontinued when Unity goes live and Winscribe update

CDA letters users (110 days to go) will be discontinued when Unity goes live.

All users of this functionality need to move to Winscribe.

If you need access to Winscribe please log a ticket.

Please see guide for ticket logging ticket logging.

Also the upgrade to Winscribe in May 2018 fixed a number of bugs including:

• The speech recognition module now “learns” new words / corrections as you use it
• The system is now stable as we have changed the way it is set up. Previously clients PCs were constantly querying the DB server causing instability
• Desktop client was failing to load templates in under 1 minute – now it’s under 5 seconds

If you have not used speech recognition for a while, due to previous performance issues please give it another try.