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Monthly archives: April 2019

Thrombolysis In Stroke Study Day

 

This full-day course – free for SWBH staff – is intended for anyone involved in stroke thrombolysis.

The topics covered will include an introduction to thrombolysis, NIHSS scale score, stroke mimics, pharmacy issues, nursing care, local protocol and complications of thrombolysis.

The course follows the national curriculum for stroke thrombolysis and  BASP (British Association of Stroke Physicians) training requirements and is fully accredited by the Royal College of Physicians.

The course will be held on Tuesday 24 September 2019 between 8:30am and 4.30pm in the Education Centre at Sandwell Hospital.  Please book promptly as spaces are limited.

To book your place, please email Lorena.chua@nhs.net or Sambanwell@nhs.net

Pain Management training events

 

A pain management training events offering multidisciplinary and practical training are taking place on the following dates from 9am till 1.30pm:

  • Monday 29 April 2019, Education Centre, Sandwell Hospital
  • Monday 13 May 2019, Post Graduate Centre, City Hospital

Topics will include epidurals, PCAs, post-op pain, pharmacology and case studies.

Event poster: Pain Management Training

For further information or to book your place contact The Pain Team on bleep 5813 (after 1pm) or email swb-tr.SWBH-GM-Pain-Management@nhs.net

Black Country and West Birmingham Long Term Plan Staff Survey

 

Across the Black Country and West Birmingham, health and care organisations are working together to create a plan to show how we will meet the ambition set out in the nationally published Long Term Plan. The Long Term Plan sets out what the NHS wants to do better, including making it easier for people to access support closer to home and via technology, doing more to help people stay well, and providing better support for people with cancer, mental health conditions, heart and lung diseases, long-term conditions, such as diabetes and arthritis, learning disabilities and autism, and for people as they get older and experience conditions such as dementia. If you would like to view the Long Term Plan you can do so online.

By getting feedback from as many people as possible we can see what is working well and what needs to be improved. Along with our work we doing with local Healthwatch organisations to get the views of local people, we want to hear from you, our staff, on what we should be doing to make care better for the people we serve. Including:

  • How would you help people live healthier lives?
  • What would make health services better?
  • How would you make it easier for people to take control of their own health and wellbeing?
  • What would you do to make support better for people with long-term conditions?

We also recognise that if we are to meet the challenges we face we need to have a workforce that is happy, healthy and ready to meet the future needs of our populations. Your views on this are key for our planning.

Please take a few minutes to share your views and help us plan for improved health and care

You can answer the survey before the 30 April using the link below.

Long Term Plan Staff Survey

Urology service fax switch off

 

The Urology department no longer have a fax machine.

Please use our group email for referrals and requests for second opinions.

swbh.urology@nhs.net

Alternatively you can still hand deliver referrals to the secretaries at Sandwell Hospital on the second floor link area.

New blood bank fridges

 

The go live date for the new blood fridges across City and Sandwell will be Tuesday 9 April 2019. Because of the technicalities of the switchover any Emergency O Neg units will need to be collected from within the  blood bank laboratory on this day and also the next ( 9 April). If staff could phone ahead to say they are coming for any emergency units then our blood bank staff can make sure they are ready and available in the laboratory.

After this date at Sandwell any cross matched blood will also need to be collected from upstairs in blood bank until the new fridge has been swapped with the one on the corridor and is up and running. Please could you share this information with your nursing staff.

All personnel who have responsibilities for collection of blood products MUST be trained on the new fridges as all current logins for the old system will be disabled. Please contact Jayne Evans or Michelle Reeves (contact through Ivor)  if you have not already had this training.

Please contact Blood Bank (4251 or 3110) if you have any other concerns, other than training, regarding the new fridges.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 5 April

 

The first message of the new public sector year! A year in which we expect our incoming funds to grow by 10 per cent, the number of people we look after to rise by 100,000, cut our waiting lists by just under 20 per cent, and make quantified strides to dropping mortality (rate vs. expected) in our care below 100 – in other words better than to be expected adjusting for deprivation and morbidity.  I am not making a prediction on vacancy rates but you know by now, I would hope, that we are targeting a figure around 2 per cent.  So, a year of huge ambition and dramatic change and that’s before we start our Unity countdown.

Alongside that quantified change, all of us will want to make sure that we play our part in improving quality.  The last few days have seen some hard and good work to tackle norovirus at Sandwell, in our local community as well as on the fourth floor of the hospital. We all know what we need to do to treat infection seriously. But quality gains also lie in making sure that we have good relationships and civility, that we manage the human factors within our teams well. Introducing each shift or theatre list, each meeting, by making sure everyone knows everyone else, and has the opportunity to ask questions or raise issues. Last week I listened to a terrific group of registrars and others in our emergency departments discuss how they learn what is going on in their department, how they can act to change it, and how to address issues of concern. Like any such discussion, workload and staffing will feature, but so do policies or practices developed over months or years that might need to change. It ought to be as easy at night to get access to equipment, medicines or kit, as it is on the day shift. Easy means plenty, but it also means neat, tidy, available, stocked. That was the point of the new resuscitation trolleys we installed in February, responding to one of the fairer criticisms in the CQC report from last year, which was published today.

Whether you work in paediatrics or in the corporate leadership, there are some difficult ideas in the report. Our well-led rating is one that has gone down this time, even as critical care has stepped up to join the rank of outstanding rated teams. There is no point pretending I agree with every conclusion in the report, and I know there is brilliant work being done that is not remotely mentioned or considered. But the views expressed by the CQC are ones that the Board, including me, will take seriously and commit to improve upon. What I sense in the well-led report, and what I see in the weconnect survey data, is a yearning for a juster and fairer culture in our Trust. There is a belief, sometimes well grounded, that not every decision made about promotion, about flexible working, about change, operates transparently or reasonably. Individuals feel their voices might not get heard, or that in some way speaking up is not going to lead to change or is going to lead to retribution or disregard. Sometimes the examples cited are from many years ago, sometimes recent.  Either way, to build the Trust we all want to be part of we have to address the big and small issues, through team discussion and local action, and through making changes corporately to help. The managers’ code of conduct which we will launch in early June is part of that, and we will consider this autumn where our values and promises fit into the decade ahead, and whether it is time to work together to refresh those words and the actions that have to sit behind them.

Heartbeat this month included details of our Period Poverty campaign. You can support that in many ways, one of which is to contribute to the fundraising effort around it. At the same time, we have many, many staff involved in fundraising for our Your Trust Charity, and for health causes close to their hearts. Ramandeep ‘Raj’ Kaur was a staff nurse on D17 when she first qualified. Raj had a life threatening asthma attack and unfortunately passed away on 26 February 2012. This year she should be celebrating her 30th birthday with her twin sister Amandeep ‘Amzy’, who works for us. So the family have come together to knit little coloured chicks with creme/oreo/caramel eggs in them. They are £1.50 and all proceeds will be donated to Asthma UK, to help raise awareness. Please join us by buying your own little chick. They will be around on D25/D27 at City where Amzy will be selling them. They featured yesterday in our Trust Board meeting, as we look to support research into how to address respiratory disorders.

In the deep background, our work to improve IT in our Trust continues. Last weekend we moved all of the storage for imaging onto different servers. The aim is to reduce fragmentation and to improve response times. That same aim sits behind our N3 changes over the next fortnight. And the new synchronising time source we are installing to make sure that every IT system in our Trust runs to the same clock. This was not an issue when the hour went forward last Sunday, but this year we will be ready for it going back, and the annual disruption that brings. While I am writing about disruption, we are nearly there with installing our uninterrupted power supply in the BTC and therefore cancelling the downtime that comes with generator testing.

I truly do hope you feel that you can raise centrally, with any member of the executive, and Board, or with me anything that you wish to – and that leaders at group and Board level are visible, even at 4am.  From October we will re-start something called First Friday, which we tried for a while in 2014 and 2015. This is dedicated time for visiting all parts of the Trust to see what really happens and to hear what works well and anything that doesn’t. We don’t want to over-structure something that should be pretty organic, but do get in touch with your group director of operations if you want to be visited as part of the first six months of that programme. The Board does undertake site visits after each meeting, yesterday we went to the new colposcopy suite at Sandwell as well as to our paediatrics wards, gynaecology outpatients, and the fantastic new clinical research facility which we will formally open on 22 May.

During April you will probably see some publicity about Midland Met. If you read the Chairman’s page 2 column in Heartbeat you will have a strong sense already of the progress being made. By the end of spring the Winter Garden will be in place. May’s Trust Board meeting will consider the final business case for the completion contractor, with a view to Whitehall re-approval before the summer Parliamentary recess. On the other hand, we do need to make sure that what we are building will work well in the integrated care system across primary care and the new hospital. That is why we are concerned by political moves to separate Birmingham from Sandwell, which sits badly alongside a population that spans such borders. Our view is that services should fit round natural communities, and that the location of your GP practice should not be the defining factor. You may live in one borough and have your healthcare in another. We know that when new hospitals opened in Peterborough, Bristol and Wakefield in the last few years, a failure to grip this issue of ‘planning blight’ was a key factor in the challenges they faced on opening. So we intend to be very direct with local residents and partners about the risks, and of course, if we can make Midland Met a day one success, the rewards for patients, visitors and staff. The natural geography of Sandwell, Ladywood and Perry Barr has brought Midland Met to the point of completion. We want to see that success completed.

Attached are this weeks IT stats:IT Performance Stats 5 April 2019

This week’s Brexit Bulletin: SWB Brexit Bulletin 5 April 2019

#hellomynameisToby

SWB Brexit Bulletin – 5 April 2019

 

Welcome to this week’s Trust Brexit Bulletin, to keep you up to date with the latest information relating to health care services as we prepare for exiting the EU under a deal or no deal scenario.

Updated information on the EU Settlement Scheme

The Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, wrote to all NHS Chief Executives this week outlining the arrangements for the EU settlement scheme that will ensure the rights of EU health and social care staff are protected.

The EU settlement scheme was launched on 30 March to enable EU citizens and their families who have made the UK their home to continue living and working here just as they do now after the UK leaves the EU.

There are three key steps to be completed within the scheme: proof of identity, proof of living in the UK and declaration of any criminal convictions.

Applications are free and can be completed online.

During the test phase of the scheme over 200,000 people have been granted settlement status.

Guidance for applicants is available on www.gov.uk in 25 EU languages and Welsh.

Regardless of whether the UK leaves the EU with or without a deal, the settlement scheme remains in place. EU citizens who are resident in the UK before the UK leaves the EU will continue to be eligible to apply to the EU settlement scheme until at least 31 December 2020.

For EU citizens arriving after the UK’s exit from the EU, transitional immigration arrangements will be put in place. EU citizens wishing to stay in the UK for up to three months will be able to continue to come to the UK to visit, work and study by using a passport or national identity card as now. They will not need to apply for any immigration status. EU citizens arriving in the UK after the UK leaves the EU who wish to stay in the UK for more than three months will need to apply for European Temporary Leave to Remain.

A lot of information and support is available to support people in applying through the settlement scheme and please seek help if you need it or are concerned.

 If you have any concerns about applying for the settlement scheme speak to your manager, or the HR department.

You can also contact our Senior Responsible Officer for Brexit, Toby Lewis, Chief Executive on tobylewis@nhs.net for any queries.

CQC report is published today: SWB maintains outstanding rating for caring services

 

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Our overall rating by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) remains the same at ‘requires improvement’ following last year’s inspection. The findings are formally published today (Friday 5 April) and we are committed to continuing to make improvements and have already made changes to ensure that patients receive high quality care across all parts of our organisation.

As well as making recommendations, the CQC report notes a number of outstanding practices with the overall ‘outstanding’ rating for being caring. Good practice that the inspectors singled out for praise included:

  • The domestic violence advocacy service in our emergency department
  • An initiative to cut pressure sores that has been successful in winning local awards
  • Dedicated listening time for stroke rehabilitation relatives and patients
  • Conversation cards in the infant feeding team to provide vital information for new mums

To find out more come along to our briefings sessions taking place across our sites on today and on Monday 8 April. Colleagues are welcome to attend any of the briefings, although some will have a focus on particular groups / directorates as follows:

Friday 5 April sessions

  • 8am – 9am – Room 9, Education Centre, Sandwell (general briefing)
  • 9am – 10am –Training Room 2, Rowley Regis Hospital (focus on community services)
  • 11am – midday – Academic Training Room, BMEC (focus on BMEC / surgical services)
  • Midday – 1pm – Parent Education Room, Maternity Building, City (focus on paediatrics / maternity)
  • 2pm – 3pm – Education Centre, Sandwell (focus on medicine and emergency care)
  • 3pm – 4pm – Education Centre, Sandwell (general briefing)

Monday 8 April sessions

  • 8am – 9am – Anne Gibson Board Room, City Hospital (general briefing)
  • 1pm – 2pm – Room 9, Education Centre, Sandwell Hospital (general briefing)

If you are unable to attend one of the briefings please take the time to watch our short video at the top of this message.

The full CQC report is available on the following link https://www.cqc.org.uk/provider/RXK

Birmingham Children’s Trust secure email changes

 

Due to the new Multi-Agency Safeguarding Arrangements (MASA) which came into force on 1 April 2019, the Birmingham Safeguarding Children’s Board (BSCB) has been rebranded to the Birmingham Safeguarding Children Partnership  (BSCP) and as a result has changed  email addresses.  Therefore, the following email addresses are not secure and should not be used for confidential communications:

We would ask that until you are notified further, you forward emails directly to the BSCP staff member’s email address which takes the form of firstname.lastname@birminghamchildrenstrust.co.uk (e.g. simon.cross@birminghamchildrenstrust.co.uk) to ensure security of the correspondence. BSCP are in the process of creating new secure shared email accounts and will notify you of these addresses in due course.

For all Birmingham MASH referrals please note the change in secure email from secure.CASS@birmingham.gcsx.gov.uk to CASS@birminghamchildrenstrust.co.uk.

Introduction to managing anger and frustration

 

This three hour session provides you with information about the symptoms of anger, suggestions of managing your response and ways to reduce every its impact on us.
Learning outcomes include to understand the emotion ‘Anger’, to recognise the physical, emotional and psychological effects of anger, to identify the long term effects of anger, to evaluate current anger management techniques and to learn constructive responses to anger.

Date: Thursday 18 April 2019
Venue: The Berridge Room, Sandwell Hospital
Time: 10.00am – 1.00pm

To book onto any of the workshops please contact Jatinder Sekhon or Emma Williams on 0121 507 3306 option 4. Other dates, sessions and venues are available.

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