Monthly archives: November 2018

LGBT Chair and Vice Chair

Our LGBT Staff Network is proud to announce that following the call for nominations we have one person nominated for Chair and one person nominated for Vice Chair.

David Powell (Matron) is elected unopposed to the position of Chair and Stuart Young RN (Head of Diversity & Inclusion) is elected unopposed to the position of Vice Chair. They take up their roles from 1 January 2019.

The LGBT Staff Network would like to thank Stuart Young who is stepping down as Chair at the end of December for all of his hard work and dedication as well as establishing our strong and visible network of LGBT+Staff and Allies.

The network are looking forward to getting our first Stonewall Equality Index feedback in the early part of next year and to planning our attendance at Birmingham Pride 2019.

Heartbeat: Free check-ups and lifestyle advice to mark World Stroke Day

Visitors to our Trust on 29 October were treated to free health checks in support of World Stroke Day.

Our stroke team hosted the event to raise awareness of the life-threatening condition. Visitors received advice on how to reduce their risks of having a stroke with some free fruit thrown in to boot.

Speaking about the event, Lorena Chua, Stroke Coordinator for Stroke Services, said: “We were delighted to mark World Stroke Day, an initiative organised by the World Stroke Organisation.

“This year, the campaign focused on “life after stroke”, but we also encouraged the public to adopt healthy lifestyles to help reduce their risk.

“Research has shown that excessive alcohol consumption, smoking, and obesity have links to the condition.

“At the event, our team spoke to people about what they can do to live healthier lifestyles. Our nurses also gave people a quick general check-up and provided them health advice.”

Janet Beardsmore, Advanced Neuro Physiotherapist, said: “We also gave out advice on active lifestyle and gave people the opportunity to try out our therapy bike, which has been helping our stroke patients to recover and get stronger.”

Stroke is the fourth biggest killer in the UK. There are more than 100,000 strokes in the UK each year. In the West Midlands, there were 85,122 patients who were admitted to hospital after suffering a stroke last year.

Dr Sissi Ispoglou, Speciality Lead added: “In 2017, we treated more than 600 patients. We saw a high proportion of our patients with a history of high blood pressure, diabetes, lung conditions due to smoking, and irregular heartbeat. Research trials are under way about genetic causes for stroke.

“Stroke can happen to anyone at any age, and we have seen a rise in young stroke in recent years. We need to prevent the condition and one simple thing that everyone can all do is to adopt a healthy lifestyle.”

Barend Jacobs, a radiographer who visited the stand on the day, said: “I found the event very helpful, especially the information about the food that we should eat to reduce the risk. As I had a mini stroke last year, this is really relevant to me and I’m glad to be at the event to talk to the stroke team about the condition.”

Clinical Audit Awareness Week: 19-23 November

The clinical effectiveness team is taking part in National Clinical Audit Awareness Week between 19-23 November. We’re excited to use this opportunity to promote clinical audit as a method of quality improvement to develop our services for the benefit of both patients and colleagues.

Nominate your Audit Hero – To celebrate clinical audit and those who already embrace it we would like you to nominate your audit hero. This could be a colleague who is passionate about improving patient care through clinical audit, who you think should be recognised. There is a £50 voucher to be won.

Note: Everyone who visits will be entered into a raffle, with lots of great prizes. All audits registered during November will be entered into a competition to win a book voucher.

How to register an audit

For more information and to nominate your audit hero on swbh.AuditTeam-ClinEffec@nhs.net.

Disposal of Pharmaceutical Waste

Blue lidded waste bins are now provided in theatres and recovery for the disposal of pharmaceutical waste together with denaturing jars for the safe disposal of controlled drugs. Guidance can be found in the How Do I section on the theatre connect homepage and on posters displayed in all anaesthetic rooms.

Sepsis is our number one quality priority: Day 19 of our campaign

Message on behalf of Prof Nick Harding OBE

“It’s brilliant to see that our Trust has a renewed focus on diagnosing and managing sepsis.

“I have seen amazing staff who are so concerned about looking after patients, making sure that screening for sepsis and caring for such patients leads to the best outcomes.

“A big thank you to all the staff who are making sure this is a priority”

Pressure ulcer training coming to you

NHS Improvement have developed new recommendations for categorising pressure ulcers. There are two new categories.

Recently, the tissue viability team have visited all sites with roadshows and ward based training. If you missed them, don’t worry, they will be back at all sites throughout this week.

They will be at  the following locations at City on Monday 19 November between 1pm-3pm:

• AMU1
• AMU2
• ITU
• D5
• D7
• D11
• D15
• D16
• D17
• D25
• D26
• D27

Please see full list of dates/times/locations for the pressure ulcer training plan (PDF) for this week.

Your Trust Charity: Magical raffle tickets

Fancy getting a head start on your Christmas shopping or want to win an amazing prize in the festive season, support ‘Your Trust Charity’ for this year’s magical raffle draw.

Tickets cost £5 and you’ll be in with a chance to win one of the following fantastic prizes:

1. Family Ticket to Harry Potter Studios donated by TMP worldwide
2. Magical Christmas overnight stay and entry for 4 people to Drayton Manor donated by Drayton Manor
3. VIP Giraffe Experience for two people at Longleat Animal Park donated by Clearlight Customs
4. One year of free parking at SWBH sites donated by SWBH NHS trust corporate nursing services
5. 2019 holiday worth £500 in 3 bedroom lodge at Croyde Bay donated by Unison West Midlands
6. Two theatre tickets for Cursed Child donated by James Hancher at GO IFA
7. Personalised 1:1 Mindful Yoga Session with Christopher Randall and one hour Yoga coaching for you and a friend donated by Christopher
8. The Templar Knight, signed hard back copy donated by international best seller author Elizabeth Chadwick
9. 60 mins Massage Voucher donated from Angel Wood therapies
10. Two tickets to Les Miserables at Birmingham Hippodrome donated by Raffaela Goodby
11. 2 x £50 Amazon Vouchers donated by Neyber
12. Waffle Bathrobe from The White Company donated by Martyn Davies-Spa Wills GO IFA
13. Dinner Voucher at Copthorne Hotel Dudley donated by Millenium Hotels
14. £100 of Selfridges vouchers donated by Mike Hoare at Metech Consulting
15. Fruit Basket donated by McK’s fruit and veg
16. Four dozen Krispy Kreme Donuts donated by Clearlight Customs

Draw will take place on 10 December and tickets are available now!

If you would like to buy a ticket, contact Amanda Winwood on ext. 4847 or email amanda.winwood@nhs.net

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 16 November

Clearly there are momentous events going on across our country. The Trust will submit our self-assessment of procurement and services risk from a No Deal Brexit in ten days’ time. And as you know, a fortnight ago the Board agreed to signal our support for worried colleagues by confirming that we would fund settlement and pre-settlement fee applications, including the costs of domiciled children for EU-origin employees. At the same time, we continue to work with HM Treasury to secure the necessary final consents to commence procurement for our completion contractor for Midland Met. Last week I included photographs of the site now, with Balfour Beatty back building and our Winter Garden structure taking shape.

I want to thank everyone who has worked so very hard over the last few days to stabilise our inpatient acute services. I know it is frustrating when we have empty beds in our community and intermediate care wards and are not organised sufficiently to use those resources (we can discharge safely at weekends!). In the last couple of days I have seen some terrific work by trainee doctors, nurses, consultants and pharmacists to achieve our first goal – 10 inpatient discharges each day from each site by 10am. That simple step means the daytime patient arrivals in our emergency departments are admitted, and our afternoon’s admissions can come in to. Night-time patient admissions are then for night-time arrivals at ED. To make this happen does mean change from various departments (big thanks to our transport team) and many individuals, but Lyndon 4, Lyndon 5 and Priory 5 have shown the way. Be under no doubt, we can safely do this, and owe it to patients waiting, ambulances queuing and staff working above and beyond in ED, to make it happen.

We are beginning to make progress with our IT. The next Unity dress rehearsal will take place in February. Before then, we need to get our training finished. So please book in if you have not yet been trained. I do appreciate that a few days stability, and a backlog of a 1,000 IT queries, is not where we want to be, but it is a tribute to continued energy and dedication in our IT team that we are seeing fewer avoidable interruptions to service. I know from feedback, not just from Ed Fogden, but from many, many colleagues, that our printer issues continue to be an iceberg of difficulty. And one directly connected of course in some cases to discharge. So during December, we will have in place a dedicated team focused solely on printer issues. We will work through the logged printer incidents, tour the sites looking for more printer issues, and I would encourage you to speak up and log any printer problems you face. I cannot promise how long it will take to fix that list, because I think it is a long, long list. But we are clear that we cannot make Unity work without a very coherent and stable printer infrastructure. So speak up, and Martin Sadler’s Christmas Printer Force will find you.

Attached are this week’s IT statistics: IT Performance Stats 16 November 2018

Next week we go live with our Quality Improvement Half Day Poster contest. Do get involved with this terrific project, which is one step in our work to spread learning, knowledge and improvement across our services. On 6 December we will announce the winners. The following day our weconnect survey closes. This is the replacement for our Your Voice model. This week I led a workshop with the first wave directorates taking part in that programme. weconnect is a Board-led programme which aims to spread our existing best practice in employee engagement across our organisation – driving up satisfaction (65 per cent) and addressing dissatisfaction (12 per cent). If you think those stats are not reflective of your view, well, there’s an easy answer: Fill in weconnect or answer the national staff survey for the NHS which is also out with a sample of staff right now.

I hope you want to be part of a Trust which puts patient care first. That means we need to maximise the extra care that our volunteering programme is helping us to achieve. We have now over 500 volunteers available to work across our Trust (up fourfold from two years ago). It means we need to create time to care for skilled clinicians from all disciplines.  We have invested in projects like our ward Consultants of the Week to offer the leadership, mentoring and time that we need. And we need to make sure that great communication happens in our teams, bringing people together routinely, and ensuring we use a common language. To return to discharge, we will not make weekend discharges work, unless our criteria for discharge are clearly written and make sense to incoming teams. Finally, we need to unite to deliver big goals like our sepsis project. Over the last three weeks we have improved to 1 in 3 the number of screenings taking place for patients indicated as in need – up from 1 in 11 when the work started at the beginning of November. This is not a tick box exercise. It is part of the work, led by David Carruthers and Paula Gardner, to save at least 50 lives in 2019, when compared to 2017. Avoidable deaths from infection, which are part of our mortality challenge. We can do better. D15 and D16 are leading the way, and hit 100 per cent screening!

Yesterday our place in the top 50 most inclusive employers in the country was confirmed:  We are ninth. A top ten finish this year, which is remarkable, but more to do to make working here a family friendly and flexible choice, disabled colleagues feel supported and enabled, and everyone to feel able to be themselves at work regardless of their sexual orientation. Many congratulations to Donna Mighty, Chris Rickards, Richard Burnell and especially Stuart Young, who have done so much to make this a reality of our values. Something to be very proud of.

Buy your tickets now for our Christmas Charity Ball, booking details on the following link:

Your Trust Charity – 80s Charity Ball

#hellomynameis…toby

Get your flu jab W/C 19 November and help us reach 80 per cent herd immunity

If you haven’t had your flu jab yet, there is still time!

We are offering additional drop-in sessions as follows:

Sandwell

• Tuesday 20 November: Main reception, 8.30am-12pm
• Friday 23 November: Occupational Health courtyard gardens, 1pm-4pm

City

• Tuesday 20 November: Old foot health, 9am-12pm
• Friday 23 November: Old foot health clinic, 8.30am-11:30am

Our nurses will also be walking around both City and Sandwell sites at various times over the next few weeks, please ring them on the flu mobiles if you would like them to come to your ward or department.

• City phone – 07976 640187
• Sandwell phone –  07976 428284

Be sure to check out this video featuring Marian Cooper from theatres who has been ill with the flu in the past and is encouraging all to have their flu vaccination.

Note: The flu vaccine does not contain any pork or meat product or derivatives.

Heartbeat: Sam Beck – from student nurse to matron

Sam Beck has been on an incredible journey since joining our Trust in 2004 as a student nurse.

She has held a variety of positions across the Trust including joining the surgical day unit at Sandwell Hospital as a newly qualified nurse and briefly working at the sickle cell centre before returning to surgery.

After these roles, Sam then progressed to a band 6 position before being offered a senior sister post in 2015 covering day surgery, pre assessment and plastic surgery clinical nurse specialist cross site. In October 2017 she was seconded to a matron position.

All this was topped off with her being crowned New Leader of the Year and the 2018 Star Awards alongside Natalie Whitton.

Heartbeat recently caught up with Sam to reflect upon her fantastic achievements.

Q: What are some of the biggest challenges throughout your career so far?

SB: Each step in my career has been a challenge, you always think you are ready for the next step then when you get into post you realise the role is a lot more complex than you thought!. However I enjoy a challenge and contributing and improving the care of patients in our organisation.

Q: What advice would you give to younger nurses looking to progress like yourself?

SB: I never dreamed that one day I would be a matron when I first started my nurse training. This organisation is very supportive and has allowed me to develop in my role. I would say go for it, a lot of the roles I have taken have been secondments these are a fantastic opportunity to try new roles.

Q: What advice would you give yourself if you were starting out now?

SB: I would say believe in yourself, the possibilities within nursing are endless and you need to take risks and step out of your ‘comfort zone’.

Q: How did it feel to win New Leader of the Year at the 2018 Star Awards?

SB: I was highly honoured to have won New Leader of the Year; I was genuinely shocked and surprised because for me being nominated and attending the evening was more than enough!

Q: Where do you see yourself in the next 3-5 years?

SB: I hope to secure a permanent matron position within the organisation. I hope to continue to improve the areas I am responsible for and improve the care that the patients receive within our organisation. I hope to continue to develop new processes and pathways for our patients which in turn improves care.

Q: Any other comments?

SB: I work alongside fantastic colleagues within surgical services and I am immensely proud of all of the teams I look after, they work relentlessly hard day in and day out to do their best for patients. Thank you for their continued hard work.