Monthly archives: August 2018

Heartbeat: Harpists calm sounds help to relax patients

If you take a wonder down to outpatients at Sandwell Hospital, you may hear the calming sounds of the harp filtering through the air.

Not what you’d quite expect within a busy hospital department. Yet harp teacher Mary Withers, and her students, volunteer Chaplain Denise Morgan, Barbara Davis, 88, and Yvonne Samuels, 72, all entertain visitors, patients and colleagues moving through the area.

So popular are their performances, that Mary, a harp teacher, now accompanies singer Jackie Roxborough, from the organisation Kissing it Better, to play to inpatients. They are working on performing in many of the wards across the hospital.

Jackie said: “We’ve had some amazing responses from patients, and they are very interested in the harp, asking us lots of questions.

“We find that quite a few patients are fascinated by the harp and when we have our sessions, many of them have a go at strumming the strings. They absolutely love it.

“It seems to calm and relax the patients – and many of the staff are also fascinated by it too. We are aiming to get around all the wards over the summer, so more patients can enjoy the experience.”

Jackie added: “We perform a number of different songs, from sing-along tunes, to calming, more soothing music.”

Kissing it Better provides various experiences for our patients across all our sites, including beauty therapy, hairdressing and craft sessions.

Jackie and Mary have visited Lyndon and Newton 3, OPAU, the fracture clinic, and Priory 5 so far.

Back in outpatients, Barbara, Yvonne and Denise continue to entertain those visitors passing through.

Amazingly Barbara only decided to learn the instrument two years ago, whilst Yvonne has been playing for three years.

“They are both very keen and enjoy playing the harp,” added Mary. “The visitors to the outpatients department really enjoy the sessions and comment on how calming it is.”

Join childcare scheme before it closes on 4 October

Due to the changes with childcare vouchers and tax free childcare, the last chance to join our childcare scheme will be 4 October.

Anyone who joins the childcare vouchers scheme before this date can continue to benefit from the savings for as long as they stay with the same employer, or their child is eligible. It’s also important to note, that once an employee has moved to tax-free childcare, they cannot return to childcare vouchers.

For further details please download the guide below.

Edenred Parent’s Guide To Childcare Vouchers and Tax Free Childcare 2018

If you would like to find out more about the scheme, you can read more on the Edenred website.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 10 August

On Sunday 12 August, we once again, weather permitting, play local GP colleagues at cricket. The match starts at 1pm at Dartmouth Cricket Club in West Bromwich. I know the football season is back, but if you want to keep a sense of summer going, do join us for what should be a closely fought contest. There is food and face painting, and whilst neither is compulsory, it should be an enjoyable chance to meet colleagues and old friends. Before winter, I very much hope though that how we work with local GPs will take a few more leaps forward. Our emergency department teams have been working through changes to the process by which GPs contact our Trust, and the locations and process by which patients “dialled in” by GPs arrive on our hospital sites. Using iCares and many other resources within our Trust, including hot clinics, there is scope to get the right patient to the right place. This will reduce pressure on A&E, but more importantly offer the right care model and better care continuity for our patients. It should also help our hard pressed switchboard! Nuhu Usman and Liz Miller are leading this work, which we have agreed with the CCG Governing Body will start in October. Around 30-40 patients each day are brought to our sites after seeing their GP and there is more we could to help them get the right service.

This week I published a brief film in the communications bulletin outlining the latest news on Midland Met (also on twitter @TobyLewis_SWBH). There are three messages really. Firstly this week we issued a contract document inviting bidders to come back on site by November and undertake some important remedial and enabling work to help final construction. Secondly, our joint clinical group across hospital and primary care met again to review which services we will reconfigure in 2019 in order to sustain quality until Midland Met opens. Anything we do now needs to be consistent with Midland Met, in 2022, and of course with the replacement then of our A&E at Sandwell with an Urgent Care Centre run by the Trust with primary care input. Finally, thirdly, and most importantly perhaps, we have written to partners in Government asking them to support our revised plan to publicly fund and directly contract for a final construction partner to complete the building. This would end the PFI model for Midland Met, although next year we will decide how the facilities management for estates work would be provided – in-house or at arms’ length. I do not know when we will hear back from Whitehall partners, but I would expect that to be in coming weeks, no longer. There remains a strong and shared purpose to getting the new hospital completed and move to the model of care envisaged at the start of this century, and finally approved in 2014. When we hear from Government the countdown clocks can be updated.

You may have seen orange screensavers pop up on your computer (more about IT below as ever). There’s one at the top of this message. The screensavers have a simple message:  Sepsis is this Trust’s top quality priority.  Sepsis is our top priority because we can prevent avoidable deaths. It is in our hands to get best practice from within our Trust, everywhere in our Trust. David Carruthers is leading work alongside Paula Gardner to make sure that, as a first step, we assess at risk patients and act on those assessments, using the Sepsis Six bundle. It’s a tale of two halves (I said the football season had started). In our emergency departments we are seeing fantastic work to identify “red flag” sepsis patients. All but one had their bundle inside the golden hour last week. On our wards the position is not yet that good. Vital Pacs alerts are not always being responded to, and right now not every single patient gets the bundle in time. I know that awareness is rising, and that we have trainees and senior nurses working alongside each ward consultant lead to sort this out. There is absolutely no reason we cannot make this standard one we meet consistently. If we look at the now externally audited data we are seeing weekly from our Safety Plan and Consistency of Care it is unarguable that this Trust has made huge strides over the last twelve months in the care we provide on our wards. You, we, all of us should be proud of the changes we are making. But sepsis is a big challenge to any health system. Over the next three or four months we intend to meet that challenge. But we may all need to change and adapt to do that. Nicola Taylor in our community wards and teams is leading work to look at any re-admitted patients to see if we are missing opportunities where someone deteriorates, and you know from prior messages that every patient discharged now from our wards or AMU has the quality of that discharge assessed. Gradually, but determinedly, we are building a quality improvement culture and system. Look out next week for details of the first annual Quality Improvement SWB Poster Competition, taking place this November.

I do appreciate that the last couple of days have seen more significant IT failures associated with our N3 connections, and therefore some reversion to paper.  Thank you to everyone involved in tackling this.  The Board agreed today to establish a new formal sub committee of the Board solely focusing for the next six month on IT.  This recognises the longstanding deterioration since 2016 in some IT reliability, at the same time as we have seen pockets of improvement.  The new committee will include staff representatives as we look to make sure that your voice is heard.

Informatics Data – 10 August 2018

I once again am publishing our latest IT performance data (the figures in brackets were our first week’s information). This week Mark Reynolds and the team have been working through how to make the changes to our infrastructure we need to make in September and October to create resilience. They are part of a £3m package of measures agreed with the Board in recent weeks. That schedule will come out with TeamTalk in a fortnight’s time. Meanwhile the wifi installation work is taking place, aimed at improving coverage and speed during August. It is good news that we have almost completed the device linkage work for Unity in critical care and elsewhere. So, whilst I want to reiterate Rachel Barlow’s apology to all affected by this week’s internet and system slowdown, I want to also emphasise the need to book into Unity training. Our teams have been out and about this week providing support to our wards around readiness. But there is no substitute for booking in to have your training between 13 August and 26 October. Between October and January we will be going live. iPM has to be replaced and Unity gives us that replacement as well as the huge benefits of electronic prescribing. So if you are one of the just over 2,000 folk not yet booked in, please do: Paula Gardner has a video on Connect and in the communications bulletin explaining why and how. You will benefit, and we all will, because all of us will rely on the data that you collect and Unity shows us. If we get this right it will save many hours of paper entry and re-entry. And that data will then help our work on quality and give us research ready information to help us improve further.

If you read the last paragraph you will have noticed us committing £3million more to our IT. That is possible because we are continuing to balance our finances. That is tough but gives us scope to make choices and investments. Some of those investments are about innovation, like our new mediation service to tackle workplace conflict, some are routine expenditures to make sure services like rheumatology thrive, and others are big changes to try and improve care like the work in our A&Es which started this message. Thank you to everyone working through rotas and rosters to help drive down our temporary spend premium, and I hope that the new iProc/Oracle system is starting to bed down where you work. If not get in touch, because in the next three or four months we want to use that system to do more standardisation of goods and services. It will become pretty much impossible to buy anything without a purchase order here – we currently only have about 70 percent coverage – so that we can be confident that we are spending every penny to best effect.

Finally, today we said goodbye to Karen Wood, our Head of Complaints, whose replacement starts in a few weeks time.  In the last three years we have transformed how complaints are managed in the Trust, with well over 90% of formal complaints responded to inside four weeks.  This is a legacy to build upon, not least through innovative Purple Point service, and it is always important that from both compliments and complaints we find the learning to improve services for our patients.

#hellomynameis….Toby

TempRe system currently unavailable

The TempRe system is currently unavailable for all colleagues which will unfortunately this will delay payments for up to a week.

We’re actively working to resolve this but if you urgently need cover within your ward, please contact Trust Bank.

If you urgently need cover within the emergency department or acute medicine please contact amandeepdhillon1@nhs.net.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Unity targeted coaching programme: week five – populating electronic fluid balance chart

On Monday 13 August, week five of the new Unity targeted coaching programme gets underway with the theme being populating electronic fluid balance chart.

The team will visit all adult and paediatric inpatient areas, ED and theatres. Colleagues will be shown and then encouraged to have a go at documenting oral intake, urine output and then customising the fluid balance chart.

The sessions take approximately 5 minutes and are evaluating really well. If you see the team stop them to ask for a demonstration. Reports are sent out each week and champions can print off how well their area is doing for the Unity Corners.

Be sure to give us a follow on Twitter @SwbhTeam.

For further information email swbh.informaticsnurses@nhs.net

Parking restrictions at Sandwell this weekend

There will be car parking restrictions for colleague spaces located between the Estates Building and Elizabeth Suite at Sandwell Hospital from the evening of Friday 10 August until the evening of Sunday 12 August.

This is to allow the road to be excavated to undertake essential repairs to a underground pipe leak.

Following the excavation a repair will be undertaken in the coming weeks. Parking will be available but you may be delayed leaving as works progress. If you have a job that requires coming and going from site urgently we would recommend parking in an alternative location.

We apologise for any disruption while we undertake these urgent repair works.

Update on IT issues experienced today

Dear colleagues,

I apologise for the latest IT problems experienced again today.  Many users have experienced low external connection due to network performance issues, which has impacted on several clinical and non-clinical systems at City, with  interruption to services such as iPM Lorenzo and Badgernet.  We are working with BT our provider to improve the situation.

Since 4pm there has been a separate issue where users at both City and Sandwell have lost use of some computers or systems including patient first at City ED, radiology reporting workstations at Sandwell radiology department and the endoscopy booking system. We are hopeful of fixing the IT issues related to this in the next hour.

If you are unable to use the IT systems in your area please follow your business continuity plans and report activation of those plans  to the senior capacity manager on extension 4880 or the site  duty manager via switchboard who will support you.

Thank you for your patience and resilience with this matter. Further updates will follow.

Best wishes

Rachel  Barlow, Chief Operating Officer

Mark Reynolds, Chief Informatics Officer

Heartbeat: Delivery suite at City Hospital given a facelift

Parents-to-be and visitors praised the new-look reception area of the delivery suite, all thanks to the kind-hearted staff and teachers from Bristnall Hall Academy.

The team, of up to 10 staff, worked tirelessly with their brushes to repaint the area. Principal, Vince Green said: “We are pleased to be here today to help redecorate the reception area at City Hospital’s delivery suite.

“We were asked by Your Trust Charity to support this activity and we didn’t hesitate in lending a hand. We think this is a great idea and we hope that parents-to-be and their relatives will find this is now a more relaxing area.”

Amanda Winwood, Fundraising Manager for Your Trust Charity, said: “We are grateful to the team from Bristnall Hall Academy, who took their time to come into our hospital on the first day of their summer break to help us with this community project.

“Already, we have received positive feedback from parents-to-be and their relatives on the revamped area. They have told us how it’s made them feel more relaxed and calm.”

Midwife Stephanie Vaughan added: “On our department’s behalf, I would like to say thank you to Bristnall Hall Academy and Your Trust Charity for making this happen.

“Before, our reception looked quite clinical with plain walls. But now, the reception looks completely different. The walls are painted in soothing colours, such as blue and purple, and they are decorated with art stickers. The team from Bristnall Hall Academy really have transformed the area. I’m sure many families will love this new-look.”

If you would like to raise funds for Your Trust Charity or get involved with our community projects, please get in touch with Fundraising Manager Amanda Winwood via email at amanda.winwood@nhs.net.

ESR Login Failure

Due to continued IT issues please be aware that the ESR Portal login is currently not working. Only users with smartcard access to ESR will currently be able to log on using https://esr.mhapp.nhs.uk/OA_HTML/xxnhs/smartcard/esrSmartcardLauncher.jsp.

Please note that my.esr.nhs.uk is not working for smartcard or username/password users.

The ESR Portal page may appear with the option of logging in but it will not accept your login details.

Please do not raise a ticket via our ESR Service Desk as we are aware of the issue and are awaiting advice from the IT Department.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused.

Heartbeat: Tracy Ranford is awarded the Shiela Lorimer Award

The Shiela Lorimer award is an annual award, presented to a nurse on the acute medical unit (AMU), in memory of Acute Medicine Nurse Practitioner, Sheila Lorimer who sadly passed away in 2014.

Shiela worked in our organisation for over 20 years. She was the first nurse to start nurse led discharge which has led to advanced nurses discharging patients out of hours on all the medical wards; helping immensely with bed capacity, flow and patient experience.

This award is to salute her work but also to recognise young nurses like Shiela, who want to develop themselves, be the best nurse possible and deliver high quality care.

This year the award was presented to Tracy Ranford, who has been part of our organisation for 26 years, joining as a student and recently being promoted to a band 6.

AMU Consultant, Sarb Clare told Heartbeat why she was the standout candidate for the award this year.

“Tracy is renowned throughout the department for her sincerity, kindness and humble nature,” said Sarb.

She continued: “Tracy has worked within AMU since its inception and has been part of the foundations. She is well loved by all the doctors and nurses and plays a major part in the student nurses’ journey when they are placed in AMU.

“She is an inspiration to us all and what’s remarkable about Tracy is that she always goes the extra mile – I have seen her hugging relatives and conversing with patients and carers in Punjabi – if ever I get ill I would like Tracy to look after me!”