Monthly archives: August 2019

Practise using the Unity Play System to improve your skills and confidence

As we head towards go-live it’s important to make sure that you feel confident and comfortable using Unity. The more you practise, even if it’s just in short bursts, the better you will become.

As well as practising your UniTeam competencies during August, make sure you find time to use the Play System in an individual capacity too.

The vascular team have developed an effective approach that others might like to adopt. Clinical nurse specialist Lisa Mallett explained: “I had the idea that it would be useful for our team to allocate a specified time each week and have a quiet area to be able to practise using the Play System.

“We have set up an area, away from the main office, where staff can go and not be disrupted by the phones or anything else. There is a desk with the computer and a resource file to refer to if required.

“We have a book by the computer and after each session the team member will record the time they started, the time they finished and what they have done during that session.”

Each team member must practise for a minimum of 30 minutes each week. They are also encouraged to work together to get the most out of the experience.

“We have developed a buddy system where one person will go on the Play System and add information. They will then give their ‘buddy’ a list of questions so they have to go on and search for the information,” said Lisa.

To access the Play System simply click on the following link and enter your own network username and password: http://unity.swbh.nhs.uk/Citrix/B0684EXPWeb/.

For more information about the Play System, and the support available to help you use it, please visit Connect.

Health and safety training level 1 eLearning session now available

Our mandatory training team are now providing a facilitated eLearning session for health and safety training level 1 at Sandwell Hospital.

Note: No booking is required. Just turn up for the session and ensure you sign the register.

For more information please call ext. 4566.

Newton 5 raffle raises £1,560 for colleague with cancer

Newton 5 hosted a raffle prize draw on 31 July to help raising £1,560 for a colleague on the ward who is currently undergoing treatment for cancer.

There were many amazing prizes on offer including a JVC 40″ TV , Panasonic microwave, Breville toaster, Wine hampers, Bottles of Whiskey, Gin, Jimmy Choo perfume and much more.

Sandra Reid, ward clerk alongside her colleagues on Newton 5 helped organise the raffle was thankful to everybody who contributed.

She said: “We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who supported our special cause. Our colleague was truly shocked and overwhelmed by the amount that was raised. She is now looking to book a holiday for her and her daughter to go to Disneyland Paris. We are very pleased to say that she has recovered very well and will be back with us on the ward next week.”

Retirement seminar at City

Are you thinking about retiring? This seminar guides you through the financial complexities of retirement in a clear and jargon free presentation. Whether you are planning to retire in the not too distant future or thinking about the best financial options for retirement at a later date this seminar covers: state pensions, NHS pensions, saving and investing, taxation, credit history, mortgage/remortgages, wills and inheritance tax, and how to get the best advice.

This seminar is available for all colleagues and there will be an opportunity for questions and answers after the seminar.

Date: Thursday 24 September

Venue: Wolfson Lecture Theatre, City Hospital

Time: 9am–1pm

A representative from the National Health Service Retirement Fellowship will also be giving a short presentation after the seminar.

For bookings please contact Jatinder Sekhon on ext. 3306, option 4.

Perfect Week continues in theatres

As you may be aware, this week Sandwell theatres are running Perfect Week.

The programme is taking place in our elective orthopaedic theatres and is about working together as a multidisciplinary team to improve our patient’s surgical journey.

You can find out more about the programme by clicking here.

Be sure to check out this short video featuring Jane Parkes, senior theatre practitioner talking about what we aim to achieve with Perfect Week.

NHSSC code changes: 12 August

We have been advised by NHS supply chain that there are number of order code changes.

With this in mind, please see list of items below which will change with immediate effect from Monday 12 August.

Note: All materially managed wards and departments will automatically start receiving the new coded products above. All other codes will be masked.

For more information please contact the procurement team on ext. 4938.

Unity e-learning courses available

To make it even easier to improve your Unity skills, seven e-learning courses have been introduced:

• Consultant/doctor
• Inpatient nurse
• Outpatient nurse
• ED clinician
• Inpatient therapies
• Outpatient therapies
• Capacity Management system

These courses are based around scenarios and workflows that you will encounter in your role. You can enrol onto them via https://swbt.premierit.host/login. Please refer to the guidance document for help with registration and enrolment.

The courses are modular and can be used as a way to complete your training and have it verified, or simply as a refresher for specific topics. Feel free to work your way through them as often as you want. They’re a good way to practise and develop your skills. They will also be used as the main training for our new starters.

There’s been some positive feedback from colleagues who have used the e-learning. Dr Julian Chilvers, consultant anaesthetist, said: “It was exceptionally useful to complete the Unity e-learning as my face-to-face training seems so long ago. It was very easy to register and log on. The modules themselves were clear and concise.

“The main advantages are that you can do this at your own pace, in any unexpected spare time you have and can access it from home if necessary. It is a good refresher of all modules relevant to your role and can also act as a quick reference for any areas you cannot recall. I would highly recommend this way of updating your training.”

If you would like to book a PC in a classroom to do your e-learning, you now have the option to do so. There will be a trainer available in the room to answer any queries and guide you through the process. Please click here for available dates and links to book your place.

If you are a digital champion or super user, please enrol onto the e-learning and this can count towards your training requirements. If you have any queries please contact swbh.landd@nhs.net

Heartbeat: Yvonne kicks her way to gold in Croatia

Yvonne Gibson, a mild mannered health visitor kicked her way to winning a Gold medal in foot destruction at the recent European Taekwondo Championships in Novigrad, Croatia.

Not only did Yvonne win a gold medal for foot destruction but she also achieved two bronze medals. One of these medals was for sparring and one for patterns made up of 68 movements and to top off it off, this was after Yvonne took a 27 year break from Taekwondo.

In 1982, Yvonne originally started training to help with building her confidence and for self-defence, however she soon discovered she had exceptional talent in Taekwondo and was encouraged to enter competitions by her instructor. Currently, she is a 3^rd degree international Black Belt. She has also attained a World Champion sparring bronze trophy in 1985 and a World Champion Gold medal in foot destruction in 2013 and 2016.

Taekwondo is a Korean martial art, characterised by its emphasis on head-height kicks, jumping and spinning kicks and fast kicking techniques. The martial art requires intense training which Yvonne embraced in the lead up to the championships in Croatia where she took on an intense training programme alongside her work at the Trust.

Yvonne said: “Building up to the championships in Croatia I was training at least five times a week compared to the usual twice a week alongside balancing my refereeing duties at local Taekwondo tournaments and my Health Visitor role at the Trust.”

Competition was fierce with many top athletes from across Europe at the competition in Croatia but Yvonne feels she did herself and Great Britain proud, “I felt honoured to be able to represent my country. I would like to say a massive thank you to everybody who supported me as well my coaches as without them I wouldn’t have been so successful.”

Yvonne isn’t planning on hanging up her taekwondo suit anytime soon as she is hoping to attain her 4^th degree black belt in the martial art.

The road to Unity – a six week guide: Week 1

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 1: Activities to be completed by all managers who will use unity

• Ensure your team members complete their Unity individual competency checklist
• Ensure you are up to date with individual competency validation
• Make preparations to undertake UniTeam simulation
• Ensure your team complete their CapMan elearning

What else is going on?

• Our optimisation metrics will be launched to measure individuals’ and teams’ use of unity after go-live
• eLearning and Play System is available throughout for self-learning and practise
• New devices will be delivered and set up in your department – by week beginning 2 September
• WiFi 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 into Unity and single sign-on into 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.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 2 August

The Board yesterday focused most of our time on the future of acute care services in our Trust.  There is a lot going on before we get to Midland Met in 2022.  And there should be, because many of you are providing emergency services 24/7, and because it is the one area of Trust services where the CQC does not yet rate us as Good or Outstanding.  Plans to bring together paediatric A&E and D19 at City are well advanced and will go into operation as soon as the fracture clinic relocates from the spine into the Birmingham Treatment Centre – work should be done on paediatrics by February 2020.  Meanwhile, outline approval to refocus respiratory inpatient services this winter to City has been agreed. The Medicine and Emergency Care Group have organised staff meetings in early September to talk those proposals through and shape them further.  The changes have implications for other specialties, like haematology and gastroenterology.  Our goal is not simply to have sufficient service capacity to manage this winter, but also to be to offer clarity to people working in those services about ward locations, service design and future career options all the way through to Midland Met.

Five months into the public sector year we continue to improve imaging waiting times.  You will remember that we set a goal to have maximum wait times for reports to be issued, not simply for scans and investigations to be done.  Over 85% of such scans are now cleared inside four weeks, and we are working to ensure that urgent scans are completed inside a week – something currently done two thirds of the time.  That same regime of setting core professional standards is now taking place across other disciplines and specialties.  Tertiary or additional opinions will be part of that regime, and of course Unity changes how such requests will be communicated to specialties.  It also gives us good data on what actually happens for patients.  With Heartbeat in August we will launch those standards, and I really hope that doing so empowers ward managers, ward clinical leads and others to know that we are organising around our patients and that patterns of service reflect that rather than history or logistics.  Obviously, working across two sites will introduce some inhibitions and challenges – the case for one acute site is more evident day by day!

Part of the focus on acute care, is a complementary analysis of how community services that we run, and indeed primary care, is wrapped around patients in such a way as to anticipate and act to prevent unwarranted use of complex hospital care.  Our performance and insight team, led by Matthew Maguire, have been working through this analysis, and Tammy Davies presented data to the Board on the ‘overlap’ between clients of our community teams and A&E attendances.  We know from work done by iCares and others over the last year that many more inpatients would benefit from continuity of care in our community teams than are currently referred, either by GPs or by hospital teams.  Some of that gap is about awareness across our Trust of the community services that we run, and an even deeper need for education about services offered through the voluntary sector in each patch.  As our population ages, and having seen a 10% rise in emergency admissions since March, there is some urgency to putting into larger scale operation a meaningfully joined up connection between what we offer at home and how we care for people in ED and in our wards.

Thank you to everyone who has completed their PDR under aspiring for excellence.  You will remember that the deadline was June 30^th.  I am pleased to say that almost everyone has now completed their aspiring to excellence assessment of 2018-19 performance and long term potential.  2 is, as you know, the routine score, but I am sure many colleagues will have rated as a 3 or 4.  If you have rated as 1 we will work to support you, and if you have not been rated as at today’s deadline then your registered rating will be 1.  It is worth checking that your line manager has got your PDR details onto the system on connect.  Moderation will now kick off to check that across the Trust scores have been applied fairly, regardless of profession, band, line manager, or directorate.  So your final PDR rating is not confirmed until that process is concluded.  The outcome of moderation will not be confirmed until later in September.  I am keen that everyone understands this cycle, for all sorts of reasons, as PDRs are important, but also because in 2020-21 the Board has agreed to introduce a modest pay related aspect to our PDR system, and so it is important that this year we learn the habits that make that exciting change easier to implement.

Four paragraphs in, and I am only just mentioning Unity:  Here goes…..yesterday CapMan training was launched.  If you need CapMan training please undertake it by e-learning in August.  To be clear this is the system by which patients are moved and registered, and so if you work in a ward area, regardless of your seniority, it will be important that you complete the training.  Likewise, we need everyone to have completed their individual competencies and had that validated.  Yesterday was our target date to be at 100% and we are 26% short.  Those folk will be contacted next week to make sure that competency support can be provided.  Your line manager should by now be talking to you about UniTeam.  This is the short series of simulation activities we need to do before Go Live to test key parts of how we work with Unity – moments like handover or board rounds need to be tested in teams, not so much to test the technology as to make sure that individuals who have learnt that system individually, can use the system collectively.  Later in August we will be auditing that team simulation, and that is the biggest measure by far in our final Board Go/No Go decision on September 6^th.  Thanks to everyone who has worked hard with our second FDR in recent weeks, and with what is called trial load.  We will examine the outcomes from that exercise, and I know, for example, that in Neonates we have a lot of work to do to get the product right for you.

With lots of new colleagues joining us, including our doctors in training this week and next, I wanted to offer a gentle but unambiguous reminder on some key aspects of Trust-life.  Car parking changes continue, and one of those is a determination to enforce the car park rules that we have.  That means that if you park where the lines say you should not you will indeed be subject to a fine, and if you were fined after April 2018 it will be need to be paid.  But it definitely means that marked disabled spaces are marked disabled spaces.  If you work for instance in our MRI services at City or Sandwell, adjacency does not mean that you can park in the nearby disabled spaces, unless your car is marked with a blue badge.  Likewise, of course, our neighbours are entitled to their driveways and access, and so I would ask again that you park sensibly if you are street parking.  With the changes made last month we now do have sufficient spaces for our needs, the challenge is using them collectively well!  The new car parks should be with us late in 2020.  Our bike stores are being upgraded too.

Thank you to everyone working to sustain our SmokeFree status.  There’s always more to do but it is really encouraging to hear stories, or read them in Heartbeat, of colleagues who have managed to quit or switch, and I know that even some staff who shared their scepticism about the ban with me beforehand are recognising your success.  The change from sunshine to rain does bring forward our winter challenge of moving people off site if they must smoke – and of course that applies to the maternity building at city too where new cameras and other enforcements aids are being installed.  It’s about a two a half minute gentle walk to dudley road from the unit, so let’s encourage families, or colleagues, to make that walk if quitting smoking is truly not an option.

Finally, in October or November, we will moving both payslips and Heartbeat across to an electronic only version.  That means that you need to get your access to a computer, or to sign up to get Connect and ESR on your phone.  It’s really easy to do that and many, many colleagues have.  August really is the month that WiFi will be reliable – even at Leasowes.  So follow the links below and join in…

Download myConnect by searching for SWBH myConnect on your phone or from the following links: Apple Appstore,  Google Playstore

Login to the ESR Hub on the following link: https://my.esr.nhs.uk/

Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 2 August 2019

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