Monthly archives: September 2019

How Unity will make a difference to you – paediatric care

Unity will help us with the care of our patients. In the video below, Becky Scollen, staff nurse, explains the difference it will make in her area.

For more information about Unity, and what to expect during go-live, please visit Connect or email swbh.unity.queries@nhs.net.

Heartbeat: Investing in SWB and delivering on integrated care

Whilst work in Smethwick on our brand new Midland Metropolitan Hospital gets back underway, you might have noticed that building work across the rest of our Trust has stepped up pace. From multi-storey car parks and developments to critical care, extension to neonatal and the building of a brand new GP surgery at Sandwell Hospital, projects have been springing up across the estate to help us deliver on our integrated care pledge.

Following the completion of the new Clinical Research Facility at Sandwell, refurbishment of Critical Care at City and Dartmouth House in Sandwell, We’re now in the midst of a £2m project to extend and refurbish our neonatal unit at City Hospital which will mean that we are able to provide care for more newborns in our high dependency cots as well as beginning work on a £6m project to build a brand new GP surgery and pharmacy on the Sandwell site. Together with the big build projects we’re also continuing investment in maintenance, our outpatient areas at City are getting a facelift as we develop our general clinic space in the BTC to relocate our fracture clinic and plans are in motion to look to co-locate paediatric emergency and assessment care at City.

It’s not all bricks and mortar, colleagues in imaging will also soon be taking delivery of a brand new state of the art CT scanner and MRI machine in the BTC as well as a new CT scanner on the main spine at City Hospital thanks to the Siemens Managed Equipment Service agreement.

And over at Sandwell, colleagues will not be left disappointed with an investment of £6m in building the brand new Carters Green Medical Centre which is due to complete by summer 2020. The new purpose built medical centre will boast over 20 clinical rooms and serve over 15,000 patients.

As you will have guessed, more patients will inevitably equal more parking, something which has for a long time been in short supply at both our acute sites. To ease this, an agreement has now been signed with QParks to develop a new multi-storey car park at Sandwell Hospital and another at City Hospital with a view to open both by 2021.

LGBT Staff Network Chair – elections 2019

Are you a member of staff who self-defines as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender?

Could you be the Chair of the LGBT Staff Network?

These are dynamic roles that can help influence the work and policies of the organisation and can help staff have a real voice in leading change, you will be a spokesperson for your network and work with colleagues from across the trust to work in partnership to deliver our staff pledges and lead events and actions to improve the experience of our LGBT colleagues.

Should you wish to be involved please email the equality and diversity inbox swb-tr.SWBH-GM-EqualityDiversity@nhs.net and declare your interest by 30 September.

You will need to supply a brief statement as to why you wish to stand and provide a current head shot photograph.

If you wish to talk with the current team about the role, please contact r.goodby@nhs.net

Join our acute elderly care team – recruitment day: 12 September

Are you a nurse looking at returning to practice? A nurse thinking of a new challenge? Are you about to qualify and can’t decide what area you want to work in? The acute elderly care wards may just be the place for you.

As part of our ongoing recruitment at the Trust, Sandwell and West Birmingham is holding a recruitment day on Thursday 12 September at the Postgraduate Centre, City Hospital, 10am – 2.30pm.

We are looking for band 5 staff nurses who are hardworking, motivated and committed to the delivery of high quality care to our patients.

This is an exciting time in elderly care as our team are at the start of putting a focus on Frailty, introducing competencies for our staff nurses with the Clinical Frailty Scale in mind and incorporating new training to challenge and enhance their skill sets. Frailty is a part of the NHS long term plan and a subject that will become ever more important within our ageing population.

We presently have four acute medical elderly care wards: at City Hospital there is both D11 – a 21 bed Male ward, and D26 – a 21 bed female ward. Whilst at Sandwell Hospital there is Lyndon 5 – a 33 bed mixed gender ward and Lyndon 4 – a 34 bed mixed gender ward.  With the development of the Midland Metropolitan Hospital a future factor in the facilities we will provide.

If you’re interested, pop in to see and speak with the team on the day, visit our wards and have an interview to potentially secure a position with the team.

You can find out more information about our staff nurse positions within elderly care by clicking here.

Alternatively call the following members of the team for more information:

• Karen Birring, D11 – 01215074011
• Vikki Howard, Lyndon 5 – 01215072833
• Sam Walden, Lyndon 4 – 01215072781

Palliative Care Training for HCA’s

The training days will run from 8am – 3pm and cover sessions including recognising the dying patient, communication and comfort care at both Sandwell and City Hospital on the following dates:

• 16 October – Sandwell Education Centre, room 14
• 13 November – Postgraduate Centre, City Hospital, tutorial room
• 12 February – Sandwell Education Centre, room 15

To book a place, please email paulroberts6@nhs.net or call 0121 507 4932. For more information about the training please call or 0121 507 3611.

New car sharing scheme now available

Our new car sharing platform that will make is easy for colleagues to share journeys to/from work and across sites is now available.

We have partnered with Faxi and are excited that this scheme will bring about many benefits, including:

• Reducing travel costs
• Reducing car parking pressures on our sites
• Improving commutes
• Reducing congestion
• Improving the quality of the air we breathe

The more people we have registered, the more successful our car sharing scheme becomes. For more information and details of how to register, we have set up some information on Connect: https://connect2.swbh.nhs.uk/estates/sustainability/car-sharing/

If you have any other questions, please contact Francesca.silcocks@nhs.net.

Additional Unity readiness sessions

In addition to the recent go-live clinics, we will be holding two final sessions where colleagues can ask any questions about Unity and be briefed about what will happen during go-live.

The session details can be found below. You can book on to your preferred session via the links.

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

Quiet time in critical care: 3pm – 4.30pm

Critical care will be implementing a “quiet time” every afternoon from 3pm – 4.30pm starting on today (Monday 9 September).

We will be turning lights down, restricting visiting and requesting that all visiting medical and surgical teams as well as allied health professionals kindly honour this quiet time unless it is for urgent assessment or procedures.

Speak Up Day – Our Managers’ Code of Conduct: 11 September

The theme for Speak Up Day on Wednesday (11 September) is the Manager’s Code of Conduct – to help colleagues shout out when we see good examples and to challenge where people are not abiding by the code. We would like to encourage all managers, on 11 September, to set aside some time to make themselves available for anyone in their team to come and talk to them if they have a concern.

On the day we are hosting a live radio debate in the Sandwell hospital radio studios, with Toby Lewis Chief Executive, Donna Mighty Chair of the BME staff network, Chris Rickards Trust Convenor, Harpal Tiwana Speak Up guardian and Kam Dhami, Director of Governance. The subject is on the recently launched Managers’ Code of Conduct. All staff are invited to post questions which will be put to the panel and answered live on Wednesday between 12noon and 12.45pm.

To post your question please email it to swbh.comms@nhs.net with the subject ‘Speak Up Day’ or if you wish to post a question anonymously please send it to Anuji Evans in Communications, Trinity House, Sandwell. Look out for details on how to watch the debate live, and pose your questions as it happens through the hospital radio direct line 3244.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 6 September

Congratulations to the FINCH team on their 10 year anniversary and event last weekend and good luck to our cricket team this coming Sunday trying to keep the streak going in the battle with local GPs. I am looking to not be run out for the third year running! The annual bike ride is coming to a conclusion – having made it coast to coast. Congratulations to Ian Hawthorn for his drive in making this fine tradition a continued success.

On Tuesday this week we successfully changed all of our IT connections to the world beyond SWBH.  We now have 5 GB connections, giving us about 40-50% ‘headroom’ on what we use at peak, and a massively reduced likelihood of a repeat of the N3 outages we experienced in 2017 and 2018. This is just one of 14 massive technical changes accomplished in the Trust since January. With our PACs upgrade coming, and doubtless more to do on Winscribe, the job is not yet done. Before Christmas we would expect almost all patient and GP communication to be going in/out electronically, and of course by then the fax retirement party will be in full swing. Pulse already is giving over 500 colleagues routinely good off site access to our systems. On Monday we publish on Connect our Wi-Fi hot spot diagrams, which show you why we believe we can say with confidence that our Wi-Fi is working – if you work in resus in Sandwell ED we have not forgotten you and will solve the problem!  Yesterday we switched on public free Wi-Fi on the back of the work done since June to reboot our connections.

Yesterday the Board considered go-live for Unity. The Clinical Safety Case to confirm how the product will work, and any hazards around that was approved. That left us to discuss whether we go live in September or November. We were confident of the technical readiness faced, albeit I know that some device concerns remain to be tested, including work in NICU.

The Board considered carefully evidence of training, simulation, and rota compliance. We were left with some outstanding questions which we are seeking to answer over the next five days. I would expect to confirm on Thursday next week which date will be finally used. It remains possible, indeed arguably probable, that we will go live in September. Doing so will depend on completing the same list of training that I wrote to you about on 19 August:

• 300 staff will today receive a note from Raffaela Goodby asking you to complete your 90 minute Capman training over the next five days. Thank you to everyone else who has done this already.
• Many gold and silver teams have completed your five simulations through UniTeam and been signed off. Some have not. That work too must be completed in the next five days.
• Finally, we have some super users, not just those rostered over the go-live fortnight who are yet to finish their three-day training. Super users are critical to both go-live and returning to normal working from 7 October. So there is a big push to ensure that our super users are ready.

In many ways the NHS is used to crisis, and there is bound to be a belief that we will ‘muddle through’ a Unity go-live. Neither I, nor the wider Board, believe that we should take that approach.  An IT deployment should be based on sound preparation. We need now to make sure that those people who have not yet completed the preparation that most people have done get themselves ready, so that all of us can work safely and our patients’ needs are met. I appreciate many people are busy, have been on leave, or have faced barriers to getting training and testing done. We need to face forward – and please now take the steps to support your colleagues by matching the readiness of most of our teams.

On Wednesday next week, we have our latest Speak Up day. The repetition of this format is deliberate. The NHS as a whole, and we are no different, has a tendency to modish enthusiasms – initiatives that happen, prosper, and then fade. The habit of openness and transparency matters in our Trust. I hope it matters to you, and for sure it matters to the Chairman and wider Board, including me. Sometimes openness creates difficulties or adverse headlines, as with our recent maternity learning enquiry, and sometimes it means that my reports to our Board are copy for the newspapers. But what it is intended to be is an organisation where we challenge the accuracy of our data, where we alert one another to risks and dangers, and where we take action to manage either perception or reality. One such recent change is the frontline shift leaders reporting on potential harms when we are short staffed. I want to thank those submitting that information both for your honesty, and for the ingenuity to find solutions that some of the responses show. Paula Gardner will share with the Board in October an analysis for the first two months of this data, and publish guidance for team leaders based on the best practice shown within it. Of course, our recruitment efforts continue, and I am delighted that many long term bank staff have already accepted offers of permanent employment at the Trust.

I know some colleagues will have scrutinised the Chancellor’s statement on Wednesday for signs of Midland Met contract approval. We were not expecting it, but are expecting it in coming weeks.  Balfour are poised and ready to be on site in earnest from December 2019:  A start date consistent with opening Midland Met in June 2022, if not sooner. From the start of 2020 we will work to optimise the new hospital – in other words to plan how we will really work within it. That is not just a question of moving in, but of moving on what we do; to give a real example, the new hospital will see us make patient-led meal preparation much more normal, indeed our norm. That is why the kitchens are organised to help with that, as we look to make sure that our patients are mobilised and supported wherever that is possible. It’s one example of many, and once we have optimised Unity, we need to prepare in detail for optimising the big move too.

Finally, notwithstanding the hurricane presently harming the Bahamas and elsewhere in the Caribbean, many colleagues will be concerned by the present appalling humanitarian situation in Kashmir. Our Trust benefits from many employees who originate themselves, and through their family, from the region. With humanity about leave requests and sensitivity to peoples’ distress, I hope that those involved are able to continue at work, and to speak up if there is anything that the Trust can do to assist.

Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 6 September 2019

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