Monthly archives: May 2019

City library closure due to exams

Due to exams being held in the Postgraduate Education Centre, the Library at City Hospital will be closed on the following days:

• Wednesday 8 May
• Thursday 9 May

The library at our Sandwell site will be operating as usual from 8.30am–4.30pm and will help with any queries you may have.

If you wish to contact the library services during this time, please call ext. 3587 or email swbh.library@nhs.net.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Celebrate international nurses and midwives day

To recognise this special day, we’re encouraging all wards and clinical departments to celebrate their best practice initiatives. Each will then be judged by our executives at a ward level throughout this week.

Judges will be on the lookout for innovative presentations which illustrate wider multidisciplinary involvement, response to user feedback, reduction in harm and improving workforce job satisfaction.

The top three submissions will each receive a prize.

To nominate your area for judging please contact shila.patel@nhs.net

For further information please contact your manager or the corporate nursing team.

We will also be hosting an international nurses and midwives day event at the Sandwell Education Centre, Friday 10 May, 11am – 2pm.

Light refreshments will be available and there will be a variety of information stands at the event including:

• Star Awards
• Library services/CPD support
• Health and wellbeing- massage and relaxation
• LGBT staff network
• Managing long term conditions
• Safety and quality – KPIs
• Unions
• Midwifery services
• Vulnerable adults
• Unity

Unity Favourite Fairs – extra sessions available next week

There are only five days left of the Unity Favourite Fairs so ensure you come along to set up your favourites. Several hundred colleagues have already attended, with many saying how useful the experience was.

To make it even easier to attend there are late sessions at Sandwell and Rowley Regis today, and City tomorrow, which run until 8.30pm.

As well as the normal sessions at D29 and Coffee Pot tomorrow, there will also be satellite hubs running from 7.30am to 4pm in the following locations:

• City ED seminar room
• Sandwell ED seminar room
• Management office, first floor, maternity building, City

Please consult the table below and arrange a time to attend with your manager. The process of setting up your favourites should only take 20-40 minutes and members of the Unity team will be on hand to help.

For more information on Favourite Fairs, including what you can do in advance to prepare, please visit Connect or contact SWBH.informaticsnurses@nhs.net.

Unity 28-Day Challenge – Day 9, Thoughtful Tuesday (Thursday)

How will you and your team know that you’re using Unity in the most effective way for our patients? Take some time to discuss this with your colleagues and work out how together we can make Unity a success.

Who were the people in your area that noticed that on the scratchcard today is Thursday? Those people are likely to pay high attention to detail! Use that skill in your area to support getting your teams ready for Unity.

NHS Hero: Tranprit Saluja

If you think about it, healthcare is a battle. Helping the body fight against illness or injury from external or internal factors, and the modern NHS has to worry about more microscopic foes than ever before. Thankfully in this battle our organisation has just that.

Living just down the road from Edgbaston stadium, 44-year-old Tranprit Saluja has more than a couple of strings to her bow. Since 2017 she’s been infection prevention control doctor (IPCD) for the Trust. However, she’s also deputy chair of the regional infection control forum, an honorary senior lecturer at Aston University having begun as a consultant microbiologist five years earlier.

Her path to this role began after developing an interest in how bacteria can impact and be fought by the body. Now Tranprit splits her working time with a mix of clinical duties, on-call commitments and doing rounds and if it were ever required she’d be at the forefront of any action to confront outbreaks.

Despite a schedule she describes as ‘hectic’, Tranprit is very proud of the work she does and its impact to date.

She says: “Our infection control management figures are exemplary, with the problems we face significantly reduced across the board – especially the likes of bacteria like C.difficile and E.coli. While you can’t account for every external factor, that we’ve improved so much is very satisfying for me and my team. As infection control lead, I have committed to a zero tolerance goal for all avoidable health care associated infection (HCAI) in the Trust.”

One development that Tranprit has been heavily involved in is Outpatient parenteral antibiotic therapy (OPAT), which has enabled patients to be discharged from hospital and be managed in the community for completion of their intravenous (IV) treatments. Being able to receive these is beneficial to both patients and hospitals, freeing up hospital beds while improving the quality of life for patients and the results of been extremely positive.

Tranprit says: “Patient feedback is overwhelmingly positive with 98% expressing a high level of satisfaction due to the flexibility of the service, great care, support and expertise of the staff. Beyond this though my aim is to continue to deliver the best care to patients by effective antimicrobial stewardship.”

Being so busy, Tranprit works hard to a proper work-life balance – especially with her husband also being in the health service as a clinical oncologist. When she’s not being an ‘unofficial taxi service’ to her 11-year-old son, and Tranprit does get some time for herself she enjoys relaxing with some classical music and doing some cooking, baking or gardening. Although, if you did give her the chance she’d leap at the opportunity to take a nice holiday in sunny Australia.

Whether it’s her work with OPAT, looking after water safety at the Trust or even developing tests for screening of blood borne viruses, Tranprit relishes any opportunity for her and her team to push patient care forward.

New PCA training at Sandwell and City

Following the Trust’s purchase of new B Braun PCA pumps, representatives from B Braun will be across both Sandwell and City sites to carry out training on the use of the pumps.

The training in the clinical areas will take about 20 minutes. All qualified nurses, anaesthetists and doctors are encouraged to take advantage of this.

Please see dates below:

Sandwell (Priory 2):

• Tuesday 7 May: 2pm-3pm
• Wednesday 8 May: 2pm-3pm
• Thursday 9 May: 2pm-3pm
• Go live: Week commencing 13 May

City:

• Training sessions: Week commencing 20 May
• Go live: Week commencing 28 May

Note: A member of pain team will liaise with the wards to inform of times and venues of training sessions.  It would be appreciated if ward managers ensure that as many colleagues attend for training prior to the go live week.

For more information please contact the pain management team on bleep 5813.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 3 May

More colleagues joined our Trust on Wednesday. Two new GP centres became part of our organisation. Colleagues in IT, human resources, and finance have worked hard to get us this far, as well as Chris Archer, Dave Baker, Alec Gandy and Dottie Tipton – thank you all! Most importantly, the practices give us all an opportunity to learn from primary care colleagues, and to experiment with them on new ways of working together. In June our new practice at Summerfield Health Centre near City opens too.

Yesterday our amazing iCares directorate presented to the Trust Board meeting at Rowley Regis. Their work is focused on wrapping services around patients, and working to deliver outcomes important to that patient. The challenge that links these two programmes of work is this: Of emergency patients attending or admitted to our hospital services, what proportion of those patients are known to our services already, and to what extent could we act to prevent emergency deterioration. This challenge is an old one, not a new one. But as an organisation committed to care coordination and integration, and with Unity coming to join up data across primary and secondary care, we need to be working through how we use our data and our intelligence to support people at home when we can.

On 13 May iCares will be part of a new service being offered by the Trust. All patients discharged from our hospital care in Sandwell will have contact with a health worker from our team in the first 48 hours after they are discharged. The contact may just be a courtesy call to check how things are. It may follow up an ordered blood test and make sure that is happening. It may initiate a home visit or other care. The service is not instead of referrals to district nursing. But it is failsafe, harking back to our work in 2016 on the LACE tool, to try and help with readmissions, and to make our care offer just a little bit more coordinated – as we promised it would be in our 2020 Vision.

My TeamTalk video is now out, and I am filmed in front of the Headquarters’ Unity 28-Day Challenge poster. We have got our Unity Corner up and running, and are gearing up for the Play System. Paula Gardner has led the way by visiting Favourites Fairs. Is your team taking up the challenge? Unity will be with us this summer, so it is important we all begin to prepare, and the more we can do that as teams locally, the smoother implementation, and go-live will be. Favourites are vital – Unity is a complex product and however intuitive we make it, the shortcuts you want for your work will be different to someone in the next door specialty.

I wanted to thank everyone who was interviewed or talked during Wednesday’s latest Speak up Day. Data tells us that many people do feel safe raising concerns or putting forward ideas. But there is clearly still some concern that either nothing will happen, or someone will be victimised for talking “out of turn”. Of course, sometimes a concern will be raised and there is nothing that needs to be done, or an idea will come up that does not go forward. But typically that will be rare. As our weConnect Pioneer teams will provide over the next six months, we want to make it easier to get things done around here. And there is no financial impediment to many of the things that might get suggested. Clearly, speaking up is about a culture where we positively encourage the raising of issues or concerns. That is why I am so encouraged that we were able to confirm at the Board yesterday that no more than a dozen incidents reported are outstanding an investigation 21 days on. This is our standard now and I pay tribute to the very many managers, clinical and non-clinical, working hard to stay on top of that position. Richard Samuda and I are clear that every incident needs review, and that we ought to be able to point as a Trust, and as individual employees, to concrete examples of things changed here by incidents, risk reports, complaints, compliments, audits and guidance. I know Trust-wide we are, but locally you may not be able. As you consider your final pitch for QIHD accreditation that is something to consider – what culture do you have where you work and what could you do to move forward improvements for your colleagues or for our patients?

Whilst GPs are working more closely with the Trust, they are also busy responding to national instructions to work more closely together in clustered groups, as Primary Care Networks. Unlike CCGs, or PCTs, or PCGs, or…you catch my drift, PCNs are about service provision not about commissioning things from others. So once the networks are finalised later in May we will be working alongside each to think about how best to coordinate our efforts. In Sandwell we are hoping to develop a shared leadership platform with the voluntary sector, local authority, mental health partners, the children’s Trust, and ourselves, along primary care, in what is tentatively labelled the Sandwell Care Alliance. The goal is to improve outcomes over the long term, and the approach will be collaborative, but definitively about focusing more attention on traditionally excluded groups and those suffering the health effects of inequality. The Alliance, and we would expect to create a parallel one across Ladywood and Perry Barr, will be our local version of what national policy and jargon calls an Integrated Care Place. The energy we generated at the Hawthorns on Monday last was encouraging, and I hope we can convert that into something powerful and important as we finalise the systems for care that will, among other things, support our Midland Metropolitan Hospital from 2022. We have probably all been part of similar ventures that had promise but came up short and it will be down to all of us locally to make sure that we meet the ambitions that our local residents would have for us to join up our efforts and coordinate care with them.

Read the latest edition of our stakeholder newsletter: SWB By Your Side May 19

Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 3 May 2019

#hellomynameisToby

Discounted prices at Drayton Manor hotel until June 30

Drayton Manor have kindly offered Trust employees discounted Drayton Manor hotel prices until the the end of June. Save up to 35 per cent off on a overnight stay at the on site hotel including a full English breakfast.

To claim this offer please visit the link below:

https://gc.synxis.com/rez.aspx?Hotel=52805&Chain=5301&promo=TRADE35

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

Drayton Manor bank holiday offer

Drayton Manor have kindly offered Trust employees discounted Drayton Manor theme park tickets throughout the bank holiday weekend.

• Adults 12+ years £16
• Children 4 – 11 years £16
• Toddlers 2-3 years £7.50
• Under 2’s Free

Note: This offer is only valid  from Friday 3 May-Monday 6 May

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

Heartbeat: Hello my name is… Beth Hughes

Welcome to Beth Hughes, who joined us as director of operations for the medicine group earlier this year.

Beth joins the Sandwell and West Birmingham family from University Hospitals of Leicester where she was deputy director of operations for medicine and acute care. Prior to that, she was at NHS England supporting the delivery of the Five Year Forward Plan.

Having started her career on the Ernst and Young (EY) graduate management training scheme in 2011, Beth always had ambitions to work in the NHS. Her time at EY saw her supporting a variety of NHS organisations with service improvement.

So what made Beth take the leap to join our workplace?

“Everyone I met on the day of my interview was very welcoming and friendly, they really made me feel at home,” said Beth. “I knew this would be the right organisation for me.”

“I saw this role as a big challenge and an exciting opportunity too. I was attracted by the integrated models of care and the ongoing work to prepare services for the transition to a single acute site, as we prepare to move to the Midland Metropolitan Hospital.

“I look forward to working closely with colleagues to ensure we are ready for the increased activity plan in this new financial year. My vision is to move medicine to a position where we are working pro-actively in the delivery of our services. This will involve greater cross site team cohesion and improved patient flow. It is a challenge I look forward to achieving with the support of my colleagues.”

When Beth is not busy improving patient flow, she can be found renovating her house or practising playing her piano.