Monthly archives: December 2018

Cushman & Wakefield visit children’s ward

Cushman & Wakefield visited our children’s wards at City Hospital of their community engagement programme throughout Christmas.

The Birmingham based property consultancy helped the children getting into the festive mood by creating Christmas themed arts and crafts and delivery presents for all on the ward to enjoy.

Taj Johal, Property Manager said: “It’s always nice to give back to the local community and support our local hospital during the Christmas period. We at Cushman and Wakefield would like to thank Your Trust Charity for inviting us to the children’s ward at City Hospital and allowing us to cheer up the children during Christmas.”

Alcohol free taster taster sessions: 21 December

Our alcohol team will be visiting workplaces within the corporate directorate of Sandwell Hospital on Friday 21 December between the hours of 11am-2.30pm offering a selection of alcohol free prosecco, wine, beer and cider for tasting.

These workplaces include:

• Human resources
• Finance
• Recruitment
• Exec team
• Communications
• Informatics
• Learning and development
• Occupational health
• Employee benefit and engagement team

The idea of the visits is to show colleagues how alcohol free drinks have the same quality taste as their alcoholic counterparts. These type of drinks are also an easy way to reduce your alcohol units and reduce your calorie intake over the festive period.

For more information please contact arlene.copland@nhs.net.

Countdown to 100 per cent Basic Life Support training by Christmas

The countdown to achieving 100 per cent Basic Life Support training by Christmas for all patient facing colleagues continues.

• All managers must review teams’ training information and ensure you have a plan for everyone to become compliant by Christmas
• If any records appear incorrect, inform the learning and development team at swbh.landd@nhs.net
• Please ensure your cascade assessors submit registers within 24 hours of training.

Basic life support training is mandatory and therefore anyone who does not complete their training before Christmas will be required to meet with their manager by 11 January to discuss reasons for non-completion and agree a plan to achieve this. Failure to complete the training following this may result in disciplinary action.  Remember the practical assessment is less than 5 minutes and e-learning is only required every 2 years (see the guide here) https://connect2.swbh.nhs.uk/learning-development/mandatory-list/

Check your training is in date here http://trustreports/Reports/Pages/Report.aspx?ItemPath=%2fMandatory+Training%2fMandatory+Training+-+Staff+Enquiry

If your training is out of date, attend a session advertised on Connect or contact your local cascade assessor who will complete your assessment.

Note: The practical assessment is no more than 5 minutes.

Vitality Netball Superleague Super Ten – discounted tickets

The organisers of the Vitality Netball Superleague Super Ten has kindly offered Trust employees a limited number of discounted tickets for the event at Arena Birmingham on Saturday 5 January, 11am.

• 25% off Adult and U16 tickets in Price Categories 1 – 4 (plus admin and fulfilment fees).

Tickets can only be purchased as an e-ticket in advance from The Ticket Factory website here  – look for the gold star on the Category 1 – 4 tickets.

Note: Maximum of 4 tickets per customer. Offer closes on 28 December. 

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

Heartbeat: Hello my name is… Julie Booth Infection, Prevention and Control Lead

This month we welcome the newest addition to the SWBH family, Julie Booth, the new lead for infection prevention and control (IPC).

Julie joins the Trust with 32 years of experience in nursing gained after starting her training at Dudley Road Hospital in 1986 and going on to work in intermediate care at Leasowes.

After gaining her infection prevention and control qualifications at Birmingham City University, Julie has returned to our organisation to lead a merry band of six in IPC.

Heartbeat caught up with Julie to find out more about her new role and challenges.

She said: “My responsibilities are clear in that I’m focussed on delivering the IPC objectives of the Trust, but as a team of IPC nurses, our true objective first and foremost is maintaining patient safety and preventing avoidable infections.”

Keen to dispel one of the biggest myths about IPC, Julie joked: “It’s not all about the commodes, I want our IPC nurses to work alongside nursing colleagues in wards and departments as partners.

“We are all here to deliver safe patient care and we can only do that by working together, side by side, keeping the patients as our priority.”

#Unity is coming…

By Dominic LeGros, Informatics Nurse

Next year, our organisation will experience the biggest transformation in the Trust’s history – Unity.

Unity is our new electronic patient record (EPR) and will see a dramatic reduction in the amount of paper we use in our day to day activities whilst continuing to provide excellent care to our patients.

The change will be massive, instead of folders perched on the foot of a patient’s bed, we will be documenting directly on a computer. This requires a fundamental change in our culture from using paper to completing electronic documentation and assessments. Note trolleys will become a thing of the past.

The benefits of EPR systems are widely known around the world, and for this journey we have partnered with a global company with expertise in electronic patient records; Cerner. The system we know as Unity is already successfully used in 23 other NHS Trusts and over 67,000 hospitals worldwide, so we know it works and that it is safe.

Change is never easy, and a change of this magnitude will challenge us all; but if we all work together we will see Unity become the core around which we deliver high-quality care to all of our patients across the Trust.

Unity will work with us to improve patient safety by replacing illegible paper records, reducing the risk of error when prescribing and administering medications, allowing access to the drug chart at all times preventing delays due to a paper chart being in pharmacy (or elsewhere) and improving detection of potential sepsis thanks to a system of alerts that will guide all colleagues to take appropriate action.

Life as we know it won’t be the same; we will all need to brush up on basic computer skills (using a mouse and keyboard) as well as spending more time taking mobile computers for walks around the ward!

Over the coming weeks I will be exploring each of these themes, and more, in greater detail.

#hellomynameis… Dom, and I am one of your informatics nurses.

#Unity – releasing time to care

Join us for our Christmas quiz at Sandwell

We will be hosting a Christmas quiz at our Sandwell site with prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place – all are welcome to attend.

• Thursday 20 December, Education Centre, room 10, Sandwell Hospital, 12.30pm – teams of no more than 6 people  

For more information, please contact louise.tomkins@nhs.net.

Sandwell out of hours district nurses – contact number change

The Sandwell out of hours district nurses contact number has now been changed to 07976 499386 for the hours between 8pm-8am.

District nurses will be contactable direct via a mobile number. This is just a business continuity action to facilitate care provision in the interim period while we then look at longer term resolutions.

For more information please contact louise.johnson@nhs.net.

Patient access team celebrate Christmas by raising funds for our homeless patients

Our Sandwell patient access team based in Hallam Building have been celebrating Christmas by encouraging all their team to come to work in Christmas Jumpers whilst raising money for our homeless patient pathway.

Mark Whitehouse, Head of Patient Access helped organise the fundraising and said: “We wanted to help raise funds for the homeless patient pathway and we thought what better timing to do a Christmas Jumper fundraiser than around the festive period. We hope that the money raised will help provide everyday essentials for the homeless patients when they’re discharged from our hospital sites.”

Bristnall Hall Academy brings Christmas joy to our children’s wards

Oldbury based school, Bristnall Hall Academy visited our children’s wards at Sandwell to give some presents for our patients in time for Christmas.

Amanda Winwood, Fundraising Manager at Your Trust Charity is grateful to Bristnall Hall Academy’s generosity and said: “It’s great to welcome Vice Principal Mrs P Harris and Community/charity lead Mrs M Kaur, once again they have all rallied together to give back to our patients, their community. Unfortunately, many of our patients will have to spend Christmas in Hospital so to be able to bring a smile to them at this difficult time with gifts at Christmas is fantastic. Bristnall Hall Academy are always very supportive to Your Trust Charity and we are very thankful to them.”