Monthly archives: September 2018
Cardiology study day: 18 October
We’re hosting a cardiology study day in D46 training room, City Hospital on Thursday 18 October, 9am-4pm.
Note: The afternoon session will be hosted in the Clinic Skills lab opposite D5.
Topics covered will include:
- Heart failure
- Palliative care
- Cardiac rehab and devices
- Scenario based simulation teaching
For more information please contact laura.fitzgerald1@nhs.net.
Heartbeat: Woodland hike proves huge hit with diabetic children
Children with diabetes at Sandwell Hospital participated in a woodlands hike at Woodlands Adventure in Aldridge, Walsall.
Woodlands Adventure specialise in both residential and non-residential outdoor activities for school trips, youth and uniform groups, colleges and universities and sports/social clubs.
The woodlands hike was organised by the diabetes team and was funded from a variety of fundraising sessions and the Your Trust Charity paediatric diabetes trust fund.
The annual trip aimed to give children and young people experience of insulin adjustment in regards to manging their glucose during exercise.
Amanda Whitehouse, Paediatric Diabetes Nurse helped organise the trip and believes it was beneficial.
She said: “The woodlands trip proved to be a real success as it gave our diabetes children the opportunity exercise safely while controlling their blood glucose levels.
“It reinforced good habits such as checking their blood glucose before and after exercise and judging dose of insulin to give for meals.”
Dr Chizo Agwu, Consultant Paediatrician in Diabetes and Endocrinology also attended the woodland trip and said: “With a variety of activities on offer including a zip wire, obstacle course and canoeing, the day meant that the children had ample opportunity to partake in in strenuous exercise under supervision whilst learning how to better control their bloods.”
Liz Hudson, Paediatric Diabetes Liaison Nurse thinks the woodland hike has had a positive impact on all who attended.
She said: “The trip helped the children and young people meet others children with diabetes allowing them to empathise with each other in terms of their condition as well as make new friends”.
Humidified oxygen delivery system change
The humidified oxygen delivery system has recently been changed with new equipment having the ability to dial 98 percent oxygen.
Colleagues are reminded that outside critical care units patients requiring more than 65 percent require an immediate EMRT and medical review.
Note: Patients commenced on high concentration oxygen must have a medical assessment within 15 minutes during which time they must be closely monitored.
Colleagues must familiarise themselves with the principles of the oxygen policy and ensure they’re trained in the correct use of oxygen administration.
Support and advice can be obtained from the outreach team. Please report any untoward events via the incident reporting process.
Unity end user training – are you booked?
Unity end user training has now started and and managers are being urged to book their teams onto the appropriate training course as soon as possible.
The training schedule is now available on Connect and managers have received a spreadsheet containing the training schedule for their team. It is important that as managers you check the schedules for your teams and verify them as accurate.
Unity end user training will be delivered by role, in 24 different courses see the course content brochure for more information. Courses will run over multiple dates till 26 October at Sandwell, City and Rowley hospitals.
Follow the link to see the dates available for each course https://connect2.swbh.nhs.uk/trustindigital/unity/unity-training/unity-end-user-training/. There is a ‘how to book Unity training’ guide available too for your reference.
If you would like a member of the Unity team to come to your area to assist with the booking of your staff, please contact swbh.informaticsbookings@nhs.net giving availability and a contact number, and arrangements will be made at a suitable time for you. The team will also help with any queries regarding the training and the booking system.
In the video our Chief Nurse, Paula Gardner talks about the importance of the Unity end user training and why teams must ensure they are booked as well as attend the sessions.
Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 21 September
Thank you to our Freedom to Speak Up guardians, and many others, including all of our executive team, for manning the stands in our third Speak Up Day on Wednesday. We used the time in part to get your feedback on some big ideas which might help to make working in our Trust a little simpler or easier. The aim is to create more time for what really matters for our patients. You can still log on to vote in the poll. Your voice will drive where effort is targeted. In October the whole NHS is being asked to focus on speaking up as we strive to build a culture comfortable with raising concern, dissenting, and asking questions. From the data I see in anonymised form most people who work in our Trust do have confidence in the systems, including SafeCall our completely confidential whistleblowing line – which reports to our independent Audit Chair. I think we are well on the way to a speak up culture. I do though agree with a colleague who wondered whether it feels like a listening culture, that truly hears. We will reflect on that as a Board and I would invite all senior leaders to do the same.
Martin Sadler joined us this week to take over the role of Chief Informatics Officer from Mark Reynolds. Martin has a background leading large IT departments and turnaround projects. We all recognise that the prolonged IT resilience issues we have faced merit that expertise. Just as sepsis is our number one quality priority, I would suggest that IT stability is our number one safety priority. Work on WiFi and on device connectivity continues, we have had outages in neurophysiology and cardiac investigations. I attach this week’s IT stats – we continue to monitor this closely. There is big money and a big plan, and by investing in more permanent IT staff and leadership capacity, we want to meet the challenge we face. Thank you to everyone who has taken part in the dress rehearsal for Unity this week, and as ever please get yourself enrolled for Unity training after which you can access the play system.
The promised late summer sun seems elusive and winter seems to be coming fast. We open winter beds in ten days’ time and a focus on making sure we have staffing right continues. It will be important to deploy people where they are most needed, and to manage rotas and rosters consistently well. Looking back on August and September we faced some staffing issues with poor sequencing of annual leave, and slow recruitment or time to fill. Of course we need to also take smart account of acuity and need, and again make sure we apply consistently the various tools we have to access what our patients need. In coming weeks there will be what may feel like overwhelming scrutiny of rotas and rosters against that intention and I want to assure that it is patient need that comes first. By keeping control of our money we can invest, as we have done in neonatal staffing, and so there is no conflict between a focus on staffing numbers and the cost of our workforce. I would particularly draw your attention to our NHS leading mental health and wellbeing services for staff and managers. Whatever the season working in care is a source of strain as well as a privilege and we need to do all we can to support people, flexibly and fairly.
If you are worried about staffing where you work, you can raise that concern in all sorts of ways. But please feel absolutely encouraged to contact me directly and I will make arrangements for your concerns to be explored and acted on. I cannot promise we will always agree on staffing needs and sometimes that is interpreted as ignoring the issue, when in fact it is respectful disagreement. What I can commit to is that we will not ignore the concerns you raise. Do not let anyone tell you it is not worth speaking up because no one listens or we cannot afford it. This week I have had more than twice as many discussions that led to investing in extra staffing, as any held about workforce redesign or reductions. And a paper on long term workforce investments for 2019 goes to our Board the week after next.
The CQC continue to visit us. So far they have been to BMEC, A&E, Leasowes, our medical and childrens’ wards, critical care at Sandwell, Rowley Regis, maternity and neonates. As always there is room for improvement, but I know a lot of people have taken the time to get across changes made since 2017, areas of excellence and endeavour, and some of the challenges you face and issues you perceive. In October the visit team will return to meet senior leaders and explore what they have found and how the organisation manages choices, risks, priorities and safety. I very much hope that any issues you have raised already feature on risk registers or in incident reporting, because the regulatory regime is fundamentally about how we manage care and improve services. Those are our tools to start that process and every one needs to feel able to use them to get across your ideas.
A fantastic response during August to the latest Your Voice survey. Over 1,000 colleagues contributed their opinions and thoughts. A special mention to colleagues in Imaging who filled in the survey in bigger numbers than ever before. In coming days we will highlight the changes we want to make as a result, as we move towards the NHS wide staff survey in October. Encouragingly the level of engagement reported in the survey has risen and we have got back to the NHS norm. But our aim is excellence and so we will see much much more work, both at Trust and team level, to make it easier to influence and implement your ideas for change.
Next month sees the launch of Black History Month across our organisation. On Monday 1 October, the Windrush exhibition – Here To Stay – transfers to our sites from its current home in the Medicine Cafe on New Street. You may remember that this fantastic photographic record showcases nurses and others from the Caribbean community or Windrush background who have served and still serve our NHS. The exhibition has local faces with a national message, and exhibited first in central London. Our Black and Minority Ethnic staff network should be proud of this work and their advocacy to do ever more to make sure we have fairness in our workplace and a just culture on how we celebrate and promote the strength that comes from our diversity.
Finally, we have appointed Balfour Beatty to undertake the interim construction contract in Midland Met. They will start on site in November to complete the six month contract which includes weather proofing and other remediation. A separate competition to find the final contractor is underway, but I am delighted to see Balfour selected, and by the healthy competition that the contract produced. It shows that the project is one the industry wants to work and our Trust is one they want to work with.
Stoptober – quit smoking through Occupational Health
Stoptober is the annual NHS stop smoking campaign that encourages smokers to quit smoking.
Within the Trust you can get free one-to-one support from Occupational Health. Stop smoking service provides expert advice, support and encouragement. With their help, you’re up to four times more likely to successfully quit smoking.
Colleagues wanting to kick the habit can now access free smoking cessation services during working hours. This has been agreed to allow employees to get support to quit smoking, to improve their own health and it is intended for the new hospital site to be a total ‘no smoking organisation’.
The Trust is giving colleagues the opportunity to access a 12-week smoking cessation programme at two sites:
- Sandwell clinic Monday: 8.30am-12.30pm
- City clinic Tuesday: 9.30am-1.30pm
A dedicated one-to-one personal advisor is available for up to 12 weeks to support employees trying to stop smoking. Free Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) products will also be available as part of the support service.
Clinics can be accessed via a telephone, appointment booking system and appointments during working hours must be agreed by line managers. The initial booking session takes 45 minutes, thereafter appointments take 20-30 minutes.
If you would like to take the opportunity to begin your journey to quitting smoking, contact the Occupational Health on ext. 3306.
Royal College of Nursing Black History Month event – 17 October
The Royal College of Nursing will be hosting a Black History Month event on Wednesday 17 October to recgonise and celebrate the BAME contribution to Health and Social Care over the last 70 years.
The Black History Month event will be hosted West Bromwich Albion Football Club, The Hawthorns, Birmingham Road, West Bromwich, B71 4LF and will run from 9am–5pm with registration from 8.30am.
The event is free and open to all colleagues, but you must register for catering purposes by clicking the link.
National Fraud Initiative
We are required by law to protect the public funds we administer. We may share information provided with other bodies responsible for auditing or administering public funds, in order to prevent and detect fraud. The Cabinet Office is responsible for carrying out data matching exercises.
Data matching involves comparing computer records held by one body against other computer records held by the same or another body to see how far they match. This is usually personal information. Computerised data matching allows potentially fraudulent claims and payments to be identified. Where a match is found it may indicate that there is an inconsistency which requires further investigation. No assumption can be made as to whether there is fraud, error or other explanation until an investigation is carried out.
We participate in the Cabinet Office’s National Fraud Initiative: a data matching exercise to assist in the prevention and detection of fraud – see guidance https://www.gov.uk/guidance/taking-part-in-national-fraud-initiative
The processing of data by the Cabinet Office in a data matching exercise is carried out with statutory authority under its powers in Part 6 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014. It does not require the consent of the individuals concerned under data protection legislation or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For further information on the reasons why it matches particular information, see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fair-processing-national-fraud-initiative/fair-processing-level-3-full-text
For further information on data matching at Sandwell and West Birmingham Trust please contact sophie.coster@nhs.net
Further information on how the NFI has assisted the NHS and other public sector organisations can also be found at www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-fraud-initiative-case-studies/nfi-public-sector-case-studies
Eat healthy – McKs fruit and vegetable stall
McKs fruit and vegetable stall offer a wide selection of fresh fruit and vegetables, including Caribbean specialities at both Sandwell and City Hospitals sites on the following days:
- BTC, City Hospital: Monday, Wednesday and Friday
- Ramp outside Trinity House: Tuesday and Thursday
- Deliveries: Arrange your fruit and veg to be delivered on Saturdays
The Trust offer a variety of staff benefits so be sure to check out the latest offerings by visiting www.swbhbenefits.co.uk.
National Audit of Dementia questionnaire closes today
Thanks to those of you who have already completed an online questionnaire for the National Audit of Dementia. Those who haven’t yet, please take this opportunity to have your say, as the deadline is today.
Whether you’re a doctor, nurse or ward clerk – if you have any contact with patients that may have memory problems or dementia, you are eligible to take part. Your feedback will help us identify what we are currently doing well to support staff to provide good quality care to patients with dementia, and where we can do better.
Please complete the survey online at www.nadstaff.uk
You will be asked to enter our unique hospital code at the start of the questionnaire. It is important you enter this correctly otherwise your responses will have to be deleted. The codes for our hospitals are:
- WB82 (use this code if you are mainly based at City Hospital site)
- SB81 (use this code if you are mainly based at Sandwell Hospital site)
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