Monthly archives: August 2019
Heartbeat: welearn poster competition – improvements through innovation
Last year we launched welearn, laying the foundations of a Trust-wide development programme designed to encourage colleagues to share their innovations and ideas and we were overwhelmed with over 65 entries.
This year, the campaign has relaunched and colleagues are being encouraged to submit their ideas in the form of posters and be in with an opportunity to win up to £5,000 for your department.
Last year, simple ideas from developing pet therapy on wards to help patients relax and recuperate to reviewing clinical guidance on to encourage fluid intake to improve perioperative recovery were amongst some of the highest scoring ideas.
Leading on the welearn programme is Kam Dhami, Director of Governance, she said: “We know our colleagues are always working hard to innovate their services and improve the experience of patients, what we are hoping to do with welearn is to spread those little gems of improvement that we know exist in pockets of our organisation to the whole organisation. welearn is a platform for colleagues to take their ideas and present them to senior colleagues, prove that they work and ultimately win the backing of peers, not only for the prize on offer but also for the opportunity of spreading your innovation and potentially improving the experience of patients in other specialties.
One of the projects which was well received across the organisation was ‘Rate my Day’, submitted by Clinical Lead Podiatrist, Thomas Calderbank. Rate my day focussed on developing a process to capture the opinions of colleagues as to how they felt their day had progressed and to identify issues which could potentially lead to poor patient experience. Explaining the principles of ‘Rate my day’, Thomas said: “Whilst as managers we feel we are reasonably good at identifying some of the bigger issues that affect patient experience, we found that minor issues were often going unnoticed. Rate my day gives us the ability to poll our staff on a daily basis and visualise trending issues affecting staff moral, service delivery and patient experience.”
Following on from the welearn competition, Thomas has gone on to present his idea to peers at Teamtalk as well as supporting colleagues to embed the process in to their services across the Trust.
If you would like to submit your ideas to this year’s welearn poster competition you can find templates and further information on Connect.
For more information or to discuss your ideas, please contact Preeti Puligari, Library and Knowledge Services Manager on extension 3112 or email preeti.puligari1@nhs.net.
How Unity will impact integrated care – GP services
Unity will help to transform the way we share data across acute and community settings. It will mean that colleagues have the same comprehensive view of our patient records, enabling them to provide better and safer care.
Be sure to check out this video by Dr Philip Downing, a GP at the Karis Medical Centre, who shares his view of how Unity will impact integrated care.
[su_youtube_advanced url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNjcCzyzPFg" width="400" height="300" showinfo="no" rel="no" modestbranding="yes" theme="light" https="yes" wmode="transparent" playsinline="yes"]The road to Unity – a six week guide: week three
All our sites will be fully live on Unity on Monday 23 September. The new electronic patient record will be switched on at City Hospital in the early hours of Saturday 21 September. This will be followed by the switch on at Sandwell Hospital in the early hours of Sunday 22 September with the rest of our sites coming on board on Monday 23 September. There is still much to do to get us ready for this new way of working.
Week 3: Activities to be completed by all managers who will use Unity
- Arrange for your team to be observed practising their UniTeam competencies
- Ensure your team complete their CapMan e-learning
- Check your department has a Ready for Unity pack in place. See Connect for further info.
What else is going on?
- Our optimisation metrics will be launched to measure individuals’ and teams’ use of unity after go-live
- E-learning and the Play System are available throughout for self-learning and practise
- New devices will be delivered and set up in your department – by week beginning 2 September
- Wi-Fi improvements have already happened at Sandwell and Rowley. Works at City will be complete by week beginning 2 September
- Tap and Go: New software to support a faster login to Unity and single sign-in to other applications will be rolled out across the Trust during August. Keep an eye out for enrolment fairs and clinics.
Note: Teams are urged to use the road to Unity – a six week guide and put it in their Unity corner to keep colleagues motivated and focused as we head towards go-live. Connect has all the information you need to get your team ready for Unity. You can book training, sign up for events and find out more about practising your UniTeam competencies. The daily communication bulletin also has news and updates. For queries please email the Unity project team swbh.eprprojectpmo@nhs.net.
Trial for new collection of journals
The SWB Library & Knowledge Services has a trial for a new collection of journals focusing on Nursing and Midwifery. Journals include both British Journal of Nursing and British Journal of Midwifery but also titles such as British Journal of Healthcare Management and British Journal of Hospital Medicine.
To see the full list available go to http://bit.ly/magtrial2019.
Access to the journals is with an SWB OpenAthens account, to register go to https://openathens.nice.org.uk/ or contact the Library at swbh.library@nhs.net for further information or assistance. The trial will be running until the end of September.
Heartbeat: Hello my name is… Cheryl Newton
We would like to give a SWB welcome to Cheryl Newton who has returned to her roots having trained at as a registered general nurse at Dudley Road Hospital in 1986. Finding the experience thoroughly enjoyable, Cheryl decided that paediatrics was where her heart lay.
She told Heartbeat: “I then trained as a registered sick children’s nurse at Birmingham Children’s Hospital in 1992 and returned to Dudley Road soon after. I went on to train as a health visitor and worked within the community supporting families. I continued my professional journey and have held various leadership roles for universal and specialist children’s services including spending two years working within Black Country Partnership as a general manager for children’s and CAMH’s services.”
Cheryl’s role involves supporting service innovation and delivery with the nursing, therapy and health visiting teams across acute paediatrics, gynaecology, neonates, community children’s nursing, and therapy services.
“Time seems to have flown by since joining in June,” added Cheryl. “I look forward to getting to know colleagues within the teams. I am also looking forward to hearing about and observing great care in action and working with colleagues to celebrate this whilst also supporting each of the specialities in further service development to realise innovation in practice and provide the best possible care.”
Away from work Cheryl enjoys live music, theatre and cycling. She said: “I have completed several long distance events, cycling from London to Paris, Prudential 100 (London) and the Birmingham/West Midlands Velo twice each time raising money for charity.”
Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 16 August
I am not going to fill this message with comments about Unity this week, as coming weeks may see the subject dominate our working lives. Thank you not only to colleagues working hard on their own readiness for Go Live, but also to line managers working really hard to make sure that teams undertake the simulation training, complete Cap Man training and finish off the individual competency assessments. Today’s review at our Digital Committee suggested lots of areas of outstanding work across the Trust and a handful of hot spots where more support needs to be provided to make sure that specific teams are ready, and that their lack of readiness does not force a delay to the Trust-wide Go Live. In implementing Unity, as in so much else, we are one organisation and as strong the weakest links we have, so we will be looking to put even more support into some areas in the days ahead. It is pleasing to see that we are beginning to fill the rotas and shift rosters for the Go Live period, at 100% in much of the Trust, 110% in silver teams and 120% in gold teams. For up to two weeks after Go Live we fully expect to be slightly slower in doing our work, but we need to do all we can to make sure that we accelerate out of that slow-down inside ten days. Based on Go Live elsewhere that is absolutely possible, if we focus hard now on individual training, sense of competence, knowledge of how to ask for help, and team-working skills. Our Floor Walkers, Digital Champions and Super Users can help, but they cannot substitute for that preparation – if we fail to prepare, we are in effect preparing to fail. The hard work I am seeing shows me that we getting ready to succeed.
Sepsis remains our key quality priority as a Trust. Huge hard work has got us to the point where screening after NEWS alerts is consistently high. Of course to improve outcomes, we then need to act on that screening, and our aim remains treatment inside an hour. Electronic Prescribing in October may help with that. But we do have teams succeeding now, and I wanted to pick out AMU A and Priory 5 at Sandwell as two teams that are leading the way. I hear contrary views on whether teams with lots of alerts are finding it easier to be ready to respond, or whether teams like that are sometimes overwhelmed. An area like Newton 3, with fewer alerts, is showing that less regular need does not mean we cannot deliver. Whenever we pick out individuals or teams for praise, I am sure there are many others who could be mentioned. Our sepsis performance data is now widely available every day, and I hope we have a spirit of healthy competition with teams learning what works well for each other. Perhaps that will then form part of your next QIHD Poster entry – after all the top prize in that contest is £5,000.
Thank you too to panels who gave up their time to undertake the shortlisting for our October Star Awards. At the beginning of September we will kick off the voting for Clinical Team of the Year for adults, and for children, as well as non-clinical team of the year, and our employee of the year. Having looked over those shortlists today, I can be certain that the standard is very high, and we have excellence across our organisation, in new starters and experienced staff, community and hospital teams. If you were nominated, many congratulations, and if you were shortlisted, even more so. Our top three in each category will be at the ceremony at Villa Park on October 11th.
I am sure too that in 2020 we will see some of our primary care teams competing for Awards, and it is great news that this week we managed to fully recruit to all our GP posts in the three practices. The future of primary care is very much our concern, and we have lots to learn from the way some local practices work. I spent time this week with Cape Hill practice, a cricket ball’s throw from Midland Met, and was truly inspired by their determination to tackle poverty and exclusion among care leavers, homeless people, and those with mental health issues. This week also saw Trust leaders facilitating the two Care Alliances that we are co-constructing in Sandwell, and in Ladywood and Perry Barr, as we look to create meaningfully integrated systems locally that are better able to focus attention on outcomes. To do that of course, whether it is in maternity or older people’s care, paediatrics or cardiology, we need to find ways to devote more of the resources we have – time, workforce, finance – on the most vulnerable and most excluded local people. Of course, programmes like our sepsis work in the Quality Plan drives improvement, but bigger gains will come from contact with people who do not use services or use them at a late stage of need.
Well done to our teams in theatres and in orthopaedics who undertook last week their first ‘perfect week’ project to tackle productivity and quality issues. There is certainly more to do if we are to fulfil our promises to treat more patients in those services in September and beyond. Just as we are investing in BMEC to expand our theatre capability, I want to be very explicit that our work to provide more preventative care and more care at home will not come at the expense of expanding treatment services. That is why I was pleased to see the success of our Uro-Lift trial in urology, now expanded in the weeks ahead. At the same time we will look to expand our breast service to meet growing need. There is no false choice to be made between growing out of hospital care and improving specialist acute planned and unplanned treatment. You will remember that the biggest investment we made this year in our Trust was in critical care expansion, and the largest single area benefitting from device integration after Unity is critical care again.
At the upcoming Clinical Leadership Executive we will focus time together on the Trust’s response to better mental health services. There are many facets to this, but one is to make sure that if an adult or young person is in a bed with us, because that is what they need first, or because no facility can be found elsewhere, that we are able to offer the right service. I know that some nursing and medical staff have concerns about that, and the plans we will agree in ten days’ time will be designed to begin to tackle this subject. Likewise we are working to make sure that Focused Care support is available to our patients when needed, and upcoming meetings with Group Directors of Nursing will explore how we can best ensure that that happens. Both topics may create a sense that either funding or interest is lacking at a senior level in the Trust – I know that that is simply wrong, but I also know that we will be judged on results in these areas.
Finally, you may have read in Heartbeat about our Cyber Cafes. The first 3 are now open, at Rowley, in the Hallam Restaurant, and in the BTC. The cafes are for anyone. But part of their use is to help staff whose day job may not give them time or opportunity to use a computer to have access to one. That will help with payslips, help with Heartbeat – when both go e-only in a few weeks’ time – but must also help with our communication. For a while now we have made use of videos to support key messages and discussions, and this week saw us use cartoon animation to bring to life our Managers’ Code of Conduct. Thank you for the positive response from many people to this work – this a genuine attempt to make sure that we are more consistently at the standard of our best in the way we manage and lead. There are bound to be mistakes, but in an organisation focusing on learning, it must be right that that insistence of improvement applies too to how we manage.
Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 16 August 2019
#hellomynameisToby
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Managers’ Code of Conduct – Tackling bullying
This week we launched the Managers’ Code of Conduct. This sets expectations of everyone who manages someone or leads a project. These roles come with responsibility, power and influence, and we want to ensure that the way in which that is deployed is fair and reasonable.
Today we are sharing with you some guidance on how to tackle bullying, be sure to watch the video above and ensure you are aware of your responsibilities in challenging poor practice and speaking up.
To find out more about the new standards, download the Managers’ Code of Conduct.
Restricted staff car parking – City Hospital
Due to modular building delivery and cranage on Tuesday 20 August, there will be car parking restrictions in place at City Hospital (see attached map). The restrictions will come into effect from 8pm Monday 19 August and will be in place throughout the 20 August, possibly longer dependent upon weather\working conditions. There will be a temporary suspension of the PM car park during the period in order to create additional daytime parking capacity. The rear of Summerfield House will also be used.
Staff are requested to show consideration for others by parking in designated car parking bays and by not blocking travel routes and exits.
Guide to decisions about cardiopulmonary resuscitation – get your copy
Supporting patients and families in discussions regarding cardiopulmonary resuscitation is essential.
The attached guide to decisions about cardiopulmonary resuscitation leaflet can help and is recommended by the Deteriorating Patient and Resuscitation Committee.
When Unity is live you will be asked to confirm that such a leaflet has been given to the patient/relatives when a conversation about resuscitation takes place.
To order your copy please contact Medical Illustrations quoting order number ML5998
For more information please email swb-tr.swbh-gm-resuscitation-team@nhs.net.
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