Monthly archives: August 2019

Competition – Disney On Ice celebrates 100 Years of Magic

Would you like to be in with a chance to win a family ticket for four to see Disney On Ice celebrates 100 Years of Magic at 6.30pm on Wednesday 16 October at Arena Birmingham?

For a chance to win the family ticket simply answer the Unity related question below:

Q: How would you find out that your Unity login details work and that you have the right level of access?

1. myConnect
2. Access Fairs
3. TeamTalk

Please email your answers to anil.patel11@nhs.net by Thursday 12 September, 5pm.

Advanced apprenticeship opportunities for Trust colleagues

With the new academic year upon us, now is the time to be thinking about your future development opportunities. With many higher level and degree level courses moving over to apprenticeship standards, now is a great time to look at what is available.

View new and existing apprenticeship standards (available up to Level 7) by clicking the link: https://haso.skillsforhealth.org.uk/standards/

Our apprenticeship team also have places available for colleagues on the following courses in September:

• Senior Healthcare Support Worker Standard at Level 3 (previously NVQ Level 3)
• Team Leading Level 3
• Business Administration Level 2 and 3

Please contact the team at swbh.apprenticeship@nhs.net to express your interest.

The apprenticeship team will also be hosting an information session on Thursday 12 September at the Sandwell Education Centre – room 5, 9am-11am where you can find out more information regarding all things apprenticeships at the Trust.   

Heartbeat: Odeena wins Shiela Lorimer award

Staff Nurse in Ambulatory Care, Odeena Gregory has been recognised for her nursing clinical excellence by winning the 2019 Shiela Lorimer award.

The awards ceremony was hosted in July at our Ambulatory Medical Assessment Area at City Hospital, and as part of winning the award, Odeena will be provided with financial support to attend the Society Acute Medicine Conference later this year.

The prestigious award was launched to commemorate Shiela Lorimer, who was an acute medicine nurse practitioner and worked for the Trust for over two decades. Shiela was a pioneer in her field, being the first nurse to successfully implement nurse led discharge. This led to advanced nurses discharging patients out of hours on all medical wards, resulting in vastly improved patient journey and experience.

Congratulating Odeena on her award, Acute Medicine Nurse Practitioner, Sarah Peyton said: “Odeena joins an illustrious group of winners dating back to 2015 including Claire Chambers, Socorro Rosaupan, Keeley Hopcraft and Tracy Ranford.

“She is truly deserving of this special award and I’m certain everybody across the Trust will agree with me on this.”

Dr Sarbjit Clare, Consultant Physician in Acute Medicine echoed these thoughts saying: “This award not only aims to salute Shiela but also recognises young nurses who always want to develop themselves and strive to be the very best they can be. I hope everybody across the organisation will join me in congratulating Odeena on winning the award.”

Odeena was delighted when she heard she had won this year’s award. She said: “I was overjoyed to be announced as the 2019 Shiela Lorimer award winner! I was also shocked as many of my fellow colleagues have worked very hard over the last 12 months, so to be recognised in such a way is humbling to say the least. I would like to also thank my peers as without them I wouldn’t have been able to receive this recognition award.”

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 30 August

Everything in our Trust is not about Unity. But we have to get Unity right if we are to deliver a model of care that is data and evidence driven, multi-site, inter-disciplinary and gives patients control over information vital to their care. We would all recognise that IT can be just an automated version of what we do now. We have said for many years that our digital future needed us to change how we involve technology, and preparing for go-live and optimisation means we need to really embed that IT into our care processes much more in real time. Next week Tap and Go rolls out Trust-wide and it was good to hear at TeamTalk this week that early product trials in Critical Care are proving a big hit.  The chip in your card will give you rapid access to logging in, and, in time, will give us some single sign on across other IT systems. It is not an alternative to saving your work or signing it, but it is a big aid. Of course going live will slow us down for a few weeks, but this product should mean we speed up in other ways. It also means that data on how each of us uses Unity will be individual and specific and our trailblazers who use Unity best will be easy to find and learn from. Expect league tables by the end of the year…

Next Thursday the Board will consider whether we are ready to go live on 23 September or need to switch across to 25 November. There are no other options and no circumstances where delay will be deferred outside those two options. I wrote to everyone in the Trust on 19 August setting out the basis for the preferred earlier date, and we continue to assess how training and simulation is going.  I want to hear from you too. There are some great examples of UniTeam engagement around, but then we also have teams having training cancelled at short notice, or getting understandably frustrated that printers are not working in their patch. Next Tuesday at QIHD we need to make sure that the teams needing to complete UniTeam simulation are on track, and everyone who needs to know about label printing for safe prescribing and dispensing has seen the film we will launch that day, and thereby understands what is required. The resources, time and help to get Unity right is in place. Carpe Diem!

In September our main focus, across the Trust, needs to be on reading the go-live packs that are being developed in each department, on using the Play System, and on undertaking those key competency simulations. With this month’s TeamTalk video, out next week, we hear from Amber Markham in critical care about that team’s experience of getting ready for Unity. It recognises that everyone starts from a different place in their comfort with technology or enthusiasm for Unity itself. The simulation work is not just about training but also practicing and ironing out how to make the product work where you are.

This weekend all of our devices will finally be in situ. The mass test of those, and our printers, kicks off, and we follow that on Tuesday with our HSCN* upgrade (*the pipe(s) that connect our IT to the outside world). The historic IT problems of the Trust mean that we managed to leverage ourselves to the front of the regional queue for these changes, and our external IT connections are simply transformed from how we started 2019. Unity is externally hosted, and so you need to be clear that, notwithstanding external power failure, or cyber-attack, we now have a magnitude shift in our IT resilience. Not before time perhaps, and not yet for telephony, but credit to Martin, Poppy, Mick, Mark, Sarah, Paul and many others, we are in a far better place than this time last year. Our first line IT helpdesk is now a 7 day service, and we are seeing over 4,000 IT queries or incidents resolved every month. I am determined that joining our Trust should come with automated IT access from day one, and we know that that failed for doctors in training earlier last month. All is not yet sorted, but we have a clear line of sight on what must be done.

This week we held our final Clinical Leadership Executive in the Anne Gibson board room. In November the building that houses that room, along with neighbouring spaces will close, as facilities relocate to the education centre opposite and into the “DGM” building. Our governance teams relocate next week to Sandwell into the refurbished suite at the side of Trinity House, and the refurbished New Square car park too. Trinity becomes ever more the administrative hub of the Trust, bringing together backbone functions like IT, finance and organisation development, as well now as coding, complaints, risk and health and safety. It houses a free gym and is next to our restaurant. With the GP practice build kicking off in ten days’ time, lower Lyndon will close too. I very much hope that Trinity becomes – and is – a great place to work, and somewhere clinicians feel able to come into and use. Certainly the welearn programme for the Trust, our QIHDs and poster contests, rely on a free exchange of ideas between what we learn about excellence and error at the centre, and what teams know for sure where they work. One connection between those two realities is our Risk Register and I sense we are getting closer to a frank document which specifies where our key frailties are: Longstanding issues like adolescent mental health beds or frankly diabolical MDT IT connections, or more recent challenges like violence against staff escalating in key departments.

All of this change of course is preparation for our Trust being ready for Midland Met. The Midland Met approval to finish our acute supercentre, with Balfour Beatty, is moving forward and is shortly to go from the Department of Health into Treasury. Once we have permission to sign the contract (we already have the money for clarity), we will see work restart in earnest on the site, this side of Christmas.  Better to get there right eventually than in a muddle. There is time yet to make sure our clinical models will work when we move into the Midland Met in June 2022.

Prior to that move of course, we have many services moving or changing. Our pathology services are changing greatly as we move towards the relocation of some lab services into New Cross, Wolverhampton. Black Country Pathology, in which the Trust has the largest formal share, continues as a collaboration across the four Trusts. We are determined to make sure that standards are maintained, and of course with Unity we will have the results acknowledgement obligation introduced for labs as well as imaging. Jonathan Berg, longstanding clinical inspiration for many of our pathology services at the Trust, has indicated his plan for retirement next March, and I know that the whole Board would wish to thank Professor Berg for his huge contributions to services and research locally over more than 40 years.

Finally, with the fourth Ashes cricket test starting next week, our intrepid team of heroes will be seeking a fifth victory in six years over local GPs, when we meet in earnest at the Dartmouth ground by the Hawthorns on Sunday 8 September. If you want to see people throw hard objects at ophthalmologists or senior managers do come along from 11.30am that day, sunshine assuming.

Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 30 August 2019

#hellomynameisToby

Latest edition of Heartbeat now online

The latest edition of Heartbeat is now available to view online.

This edition features news on our new managers’ code of conduct and the launch of our new cyber cafés across the Trust.

Apprentice of the month – get your nominations in!

The healthworks team, which covers SWB has introduced an apprentice of the month award.

The team are looking for your help to highlight the great work our apprentices do, by nominating someone who really stands out to you. Every month a winner will be picked from the Trust and they will receive a certificate and a prize.

Anyone can make a nomination by using the form below.

Apprentice of the month nomination form

Please return all completed signed forms to maxine.griffiths@nhs.net.

Limited food at Arches

Due to equipment failure in Arches retail unit at City Hospital, there will only be a very limited food service until further notice. An additional food service will be available in BTC and Boaters.

For more information please contact dcalder@nhs.net.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Recruitment team allocation and contacts list updated

The recruitment team allocation and contacts list has been updated. To see who your new contact is see the link below.

These includes queries relating to:

• Medical staffing
• Medicine and emergency care
• Surgical services
• Primary care community and therapies
• Corporate
• Imaging
• Women and child health
• Honorary contracts
• Retire and return

Recruitment team allocation sheet

CCG celebration event: 5 September

Sandwell and West Birmingham Clinical Commissioning Group will be hosting a celebration drop in event on Thursday 5 September at the Richardson Suite, West Bromwich Albion Football Club,  B71 4LF between 12pm – 2.45pm prior to their AGM.

The event encourages all health professionals to go along and talk about their fantastic achievements in improving health outcomes for patients and the public.

For more information please contact swbccg.engagement@nhs.net.

Unity go-live clinics start next week – book your place

Going live with Unity will involve major changes to the way we work. This will understandably create uncertainty and raise some questions about what to expect during September and beyond.

To provide reassurance to colleagues, the Unity project team are holding a number of go-live clinics starting next week. This will be the perfect opportunity to find out more about Unity and how it will affect you, and also to ask any questions you may have about going live with our new electronic patient record.

If you would like more information about go-live support, the cutover schedule or anything else related to Unity then please book a place and come along. The details are below:

For more information about the go-live clinics, or going live with Unity in general, please contact swbh.unity.queries@nhs.net.