Monthly archives: January 2019

Targeted coaching programme: Week 2

As part of the pre go-live preparations and engagement; the Unity clinical informatics team will be visiting departments over the next 14 weeks to deliver targeted coaching to clinical colleagues.

These will be short (typically five minutes) and normally one-to-one micro-coaching sessions to ensure that our clinical colleagues are prepared for when Unity goes live later this year.

It is critical to stress that this is not a training programme and is not a replacement for the formal end user training which is a requirement for all colleagues (including those that have already undertaken digital champion and/or early adopter training).

The team will endeavour to avoid causing any disruption to ward routines and have written to ward managers to allow team members the time to participate in these sessions and start to get familiar with Unity.

During week two, nurses will be coached on nurse rounding in Unity, how to order a reminder for a set time for care rounding to be completed and how to document care provided.

Ward clerks will also have the opportunity to learn more about adding favourites and personalising the capman screen. This benefit of these coaching sessions is getting to understand capman, and using favourites will save time once set up.

Unity roadshows continue this week

This week the Unity roadshows continue with the theme of how Unity supports falls management.

The roadshows will also provide key information about the Unity play system, support networks via social media and training.

Be sure to come and visit the stands between 11am and 1pm to discuss how unity will support your clinical practices.

Join car benefit scheme in January/February for a chance to win a Merlin Pass

Place an order on the Tusker car benefit scheme for a brand new and fully maintained and insured car in January or February to be in with the chance of winning 1 of 10 sets of Premium Annual Merlin Passes.

Your fixed monthly amount covers insurance, road tax, replacement tyres, breakdown cover, servicing, MOT and maintenance; so there are no unexpected garage bills. There is no deposit to pay and no checks on your credit history either, so you can order today and soon be driving a brand new car.

To get a no obligation quote and see the full range of cars available simply visit to tuskercars.com, call 0333 400 7431 or email EET@tuskerdirect.com.

To find out more about employee benefits at SWBH please contact amir.ali1@nhs.net.

Heartbeat: Trainee doctors present ideas on teamwork and leadership

During semester one of their medicine and surgery placement at our hospitals, third year medical students undertake a teamwork and leadership activity. They study the contribution of good teamwork and leadership to effective care at different stages during a patient’s hospital journey.

Christine Edmunds, Undergraduate Co-ordinator explained more to Heartbeat. She said: “The third year students do this activity every year and it plays in important part in their course. It gives them the opportunity to do an in-depth study on a patient they are particularly interested in and explore their journey through the hospital.

“They learn about other healthcare professionals, other than doctors who play a vital role in a patient’s care and they look at the importance of teamwork in providing high quality patient care.

“The students then present their case to their peers within their firm and the senior academy tutor choses one of the students to present at the grand round – six students present at City Hospital and the other six present at Sandwell Hospital.”

The presentations are judged by senior medical colleagues and this year Dr Jawad Khan, Consultant Cardiologist, Dr Ed Fogden, Consultant Gastroenterologist and Vijay Thumbe, Consultant Surgeon presided over the proceedings at City Hospital, whilst Kevin Wheatley, Consultant Surgeon, Rajeev Peravali, Consultant Surgeon, Dr Deep Chand, Consultant Radiologist were in the judge’s chair at Sandwell.

Chris added: “The judges were really impressed with the quality of the presentations from all of the students and the marking was extremely close. In fact, at the Sandwell grand round there were joint runners-up and only one mark between them and the winning presentation.”

The winner at City Hospital was Patrick Hurley with Rosanna Watts taking second place. At Sandwell Hospital Todd Cooper took top prize whilst Dairy Pamment and Angus Grant were named as runners up.

RCNi nursing careers job fair: 10 March

Are you looking for CPD hours? If so then why not attend the RCNi nursing careers job fair on Tuesday 10 March at Birmingham NEC.

Entry is FREE and nurses can pre-register here:  www.careersandjobsfair.com/birmingham-2020. Full information about the event is also available on this website.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 11 January

Earlier this week the NHS “ten year” Long Term Plan https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/ was published.  In due course the financial and workforce implication documents will also be issued. In truth local projects and ambition always matter more than national directives, but if you have had a chance to look through the plan you cannot fail to be struck by how our 2020 vision, and the work we have done on public health, on integrating care, and on long term conditions is reflected now in national strategy. We are working ever more closely with the primary care networks that local GPs have developed, and looking to build on strong partnerships with both local mental health Trusts. With our award winning integration projects in respiratory disease and diabetes, and community rooted teams like iCares and our heart failure team, we should be ambitious about what we can do next or more of. This February in Sandwell we will see a huge emphasis on tackling obesity in children and young people, and of course come July, our own smoke-free policy will be live in a place near your window.

Winter in the NHS is not all about bed crisis or pressure – many thousands of our colleagues are working fantastically hard in other areas of need. But I do want to pay tribute to site nurse practitioners, duty managers, nurses in charge in ED, and on call teams for the work being done to keep patients safe. Next week we are trying some new and different ideas in our EDs to try and reduce waiting times because we all want the experience of our patients to be good. The NHS Constitution which sets out our rights as citizens does matter, and it is, as it happens also explicit in our contracts as NHS workers. So for the right reasons, and because it is what we promised, we must face up to the work we have to do to reduce waiting times. In the last three months we have had three external reviews of our emergency care services. All three have reached the same conclusions. We have got great energy and ideas from ‘frontline’ to Board. We have got plenty of staff, and by comparison to national norms and standards are well resourced in emergency care. But our combined efforts are not yet translating into acceptable wait times, despite everyone’s hard work, going above and beyond. We do not have rising numbers of patients coming. We are not organising ourselves to meet expected demands. Yet if we have the right ideas and enthusiasm, and we do, then we need to be optimistic that we can turnaround a position where urgent care wait times here are now among the longest in the country for a minority of patients.

I chaired this week a Table Top Review (TTR) of the care of a patient, whose long term outcome and outlook is good. She was not overtly harmed by the many hours she spent with us. I was struck during the TTR by a few things that I wanted to share with you. Firstly, we ought to be pleased to work in the kind of organisation that does not wait for harm to come to someone to learn from our mistakes. Secondly, that communication is both the most important and toughest thing in healthcare. As I listened to clinicians and managers talk in the review, it was clear that everyone was telling the truth. And believed that their own view was the one heard and shared by others. Yet it was also clear that we had not taken or documented collective decisions on which we acted. For some hours of our patient’s stay, part of her care team was acting on one plan, but another part was working with, perhaps, a different plan. Thirdly, and under my accountability, our management processes to manage the safety of our sites, and make decisions in time of crisis, did not make or enact decisions. The nature of management is that it should anticipate tonight or next week’s problems and act to prevent, or mitigate them. That is what we need to learn to do. Of course that has implications for everyone in our Trust. For example, it means that the data we collect or use needs to be real and to be right. It is still the case that around a third of our Expected Dates of Patient Discharge are nothing of the sort. They are a holding date, or a date to be moved from one place to another, or an estimated date. Not one we are working towards. So all of us can contribute to helping to have the data to cause decisions to be made, and we will develop systems to make difficult decisions that keep patients, and colleagues, safe. Finally, we will, from this case, and others review some of our departmental procedures. Because whilst each unit will have its own way of working safely, when we add those ways together they cannot, fairly, mean either that there is nowhere for a patient to go, or our A&E department becomes a place of last resort on behalf of the hospital.

Whether it is annual winter pressures or another national plan for the NHS, it is always good to see something that has always been an issue coming to fruition with major improvements. So I wanted to call out the work that Bethan Downing and many others are doing to ensure that among our many amazing projects in our workplace, we have some focus on employing local people with learning disabilities. We have now a series of programmes, in part, linked to Sandwell College, and some pilot initiatives in theatres and elsewhere. Of course, becoming an employer able to work with all potential employees, demands change, and one is that we make sure that many of our jobs, are able to be undertaken part time or in a job share basis. That is anyway part of the flexible working package that we will confirm in February as part of our weConnect programme, because flexible working was one of the top 3 issues you voted to say we need to do better at the Trust. At the same time, I understand we have persuaded the national ESR data centre to change their data collection to allow us to report on how many employees we have with learning disabilities, so that we can be open with ourselves and local partners about whether we are succeeding in offering equal opportunities.  In this organisation, how we treat the most excluded and vulnerable people we share our community with, is, and always should be, a measure of our values, and I hope that you share a commitment to make that a reality for local residents, whether we are thinking about healthcare for homeless people, or employment rights for care leavers.

I know we did not make it to the Top 40 with our Christmas Charity single. But among the latest news from Your Trust Charity is funding for our reading scheme for children in our paediatric wards, undertaken jointly with the Sandwell Library Service. In the spring, anyone using our libraries will be able to order and collect books from the wider borough library collection on site. Why not try it?  It’s just behind the Amazon locker at Sandwell (the amazon locker at City is outside BMEC).

I did promise last week to write about IT. I will, although I do not want to jinx the improvement seen since October in our resilience. I will return to the topic over the next fortnight once we have firmed up certain plans for further improvement, including confirming when our N3 connection will be upgraded, which is the single biggest source of downtime over the last 12 months. Attached are this week’s IT statistics: IT Performance Stats 11 January 2019

More quick quiz “number” news, if you read my message last week:  852 people who had not done Basic Life Support training is now down to less than 350! And with your payslip in January you will get your very own mandatory training record, so that you know what you need to finish by 31 March. Remember, across the NHS from April you will not be eligible for your pay increment if you are not mandatory training compliant under Agenda for Change…

#hellomynameis…Toby

Heartbeat: Walking football star Brian gets back on his feet

Each month the Trust Board hears about the experiences from one of our patients. In December, Mr Brian Hassall, came to talk to Board members about the care he received at Sandwell General Hospital after a bad tackle in his walking football match.

Mr Hassall, 74, from Rugeley, has had a long career as financial advisor to leading Premier League footballers. A keen sportsman himself, he was introduced to walking football two and a half years ago and has excelled at the sport, playing regularly for the Aston Villa team. It was during a match at Villa Park that Brian enthusiastically tackled an opponent who was a former European cup winner.

That tackle caused him a serious hip fracture and he was rushed to Sandwell Hospital, by ambulance, straight from the Villa ground.

He was assessed, given an x-ray and transferred to a ward overnight. Surgery to repair his hip was carried out and, after a three day stay in hospital, Brian was discharged home.

Talking about his experience, Brian said: “The nurses were wonderful and the care I received was fantastic. I told the consultant I wanted to be the fastest recovering 74 year old.

“A tiny bit of criticism was that on arrival to the emergency department all I wanted was someone to look me in the eye and acknowledge me. I know that they were busy and that they would see me but eye contact would have been reassuring. When I had the x-ray, unfortunately, a porter pulled on my damaged leg when they were trying to help me – that was so painful! I know they didn’t mean to do it but I wondered if a label marking the part of the body that needed treatment would be helpful?

“Unfortunately the team doing the x-ray weren’t able to tell me the results, just that I had to stay in overnight. It would have made me worry less if I knew what the problem was and whether I would need surgery.

“At the start of the surgery I was really impressed by the way the senior sister stopped everyone before the procedure and went through a checklist. It was like a SAS military operation. I had confidence that everyone knew exactly what they were doing and I was in safe hands.

“All in all, I think I had wonderful care. Sandwell isn’t my local hospital but I’m so glad I was cared for here. I’m looking forward to getting back to walking football – my wife has banned it until I turn 75!”

Drayton Manor discounted tickets: 9 February-24 February

Drayton Manor have kindly offered Trust employees discounted Drayton Manor theme park tickets between 9 February-24 February.

Please see Drayton Manor discounted tickets offer for full details and instructions for how to claim discounted tickets.

Car parking is charged at a daily rate of £2 (subject to change at any time throughout the season). Please visit www.draytonmanor.co.uk for further information and T&C’s.

To find out more about employee benefits at SWBH please contact  amir.ali1@nhs.net.

Heartbeat: Over 150 colleagues get set for the February dress rehearsal of Unity

26 clinical areas are set to take part in the February dress rehearsal of Unity scheduled to take place from Monday 11 February 2019.

This dress rehearsal is a complete run through of all activities that will take place when we go live with Unity. It is used to identify issues and drive out risk and ensure we’re ready for go-live.

For the selected operational teams and 154 clinical colleagues, it’s an opportunity to verify that Unity works in a business as usual context.

The dress rehearsal is made up of two stages that are performed in a single window covering a three week period: (1) Technical activities and (2) Operational activities and simulated go-live. This is then followed by time to resolve the issues before moving to an agreed launch date.

The sequence of the three weeks is as follows:

• Week 1 – Technical work to ensure that the IT systems integrate, downstream system testing and simulating technical go-live.
• Week 2 – Starting Monday 11 February clinical teams will carry out operational work to use the system in a live setting. In practice this means a small number of users dual keying between current systems and Unity. (Normal work continues as usual on current systems, with activity then being replicated on Unity).
• Week 3 – Focused work on areas of concern and issue resolution, and the reports team completing analysis and rework.

Shafiq Ullah, Unity Cutover Manager explained more: “My role as cutover manager is to make sure that we have everything in place ready for when we move from the old systems to Unity. The February dress rehearsal will involve colleagues across many professions including health care assistants, ward clerks, nurses, doctors, porters, pharmacists and healthcare scientists all coming together over a period of five days to test Unity and ensure it is fit for purpose.

“During the dress rehearsal support will be provided by 15 staff (including executives) from Cerner, the company that has developed Unity. Our senior leaders will also be on hand along with the informatics team and 61 colleagues from the Unity project team.”

There is much for all of us to do within a very short time and everyone is urged to play their part.

The Unity project team has already been in contact with the teams selected to be part of the dress rehearsal regarding details of the resources required.

For everyone else, please ensure you are up to date with the Unity end user training. If you have attended training, keep your knowledge fresh by using the Unity Play System. If you haven’t had training, then please speak to your line manager about booking on as soon as possible.

Notice to all prescribers

The National Clinical Guidelines for the use of immunoglobulins has been updated for use in haematology, immunology and neurology indications.

For details please visit Connect:

https://connect2.swbh.nhs.uk/pharmacy/immunoglobulin-ivig/

All requests should be submitted to the SWBH Immunoglogluin Assessment Panel in the usual way before starting treatment at swb-tr.SWBH-Team-IVIgPanel@nhs.net