Monthly archives: November 2019

A new employability venture through the volunteer service

We are starting a new project called World of Work (WoW) which is a unique work experience placement programme specifically designed and funded for job seekers and unemployed people who are age 25 plus, that meet the referral criteria, and live within the Birmingham and Solihull catchment area.

World of Work could be for you or someone you know, especially if:

• You are age 25 plus, unemployed, want to be ‘job ready’ and live in Birmingham within three to five miles of City Hospital.
• You have no formal qualifications, but really want to pursue a career in the Healthcare sector.
• You currently volunteer in a healthcare related setting but you now require retraining and accredited qualifications.
• You have the capacity to attend 16 hours of development training for eight weeks including work-based experience as a placement across Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust or with external health and social care service partner organisations, community projects or schools.
• You’ve often thought about applying for a job within the NHS but you didn’t apply due to having no recent or valid work experience.

If YES to at least three of any of the above then the World of Work ‘Pathway to Employment’ at Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust might be just for you.

For more information please visit:

https://www.swbh.nhs.uk/volunteers/worldofwork/

To enrol please click here and fill in the application form by Monday 13 January or email lizagill@nhs.net if you need support with filling in the application. We look forward to hearing from you.

Heartbeat: Community nurses turn specialist practitioners

Three of our top nurses have been successful in qualifying as specialist practitioners in district nursing.

Nursing is at the heart of our organisation. Recently three of our nurses have completed the Specialist Community Nursing (SCN) District Nursing BSc (Hons) degree at the University of Wolverhampton.

Chantelle Kenyon, Susan Oliver and Harbinder Gill from our community nursing service all completed the 12 month course. It involved both theory and clinical practice elements from assignments to completion of the Queen’s Nursing Institute domains in clinical care. The qualification is equal to either a degree or postgraduate diploma.

Susan Knight, Practice Education Lead and Black Country Practice District Nurse Team Leader is thrilled for Chantelle, Susan and Harbinder. She said “I’m delighted with their achievements. They can all hold their heads up high knowing they have secured band 6 clinical posts at the Trust. They’ve made me feel so proud. I’m sure their friends and families feel the same way too.”

Qualifying as a specialist practitioner in district nursing can be very challenging. Individuals have to show higher levels of judgement and discretion in practice. They must also work within the nursing and midwifery professional standards of practice.

Susan added “The course tests your ability to be able to balance both theory and practical elements of learning. The amount of academic work in addition to working clinically is at a higher level.”

Planned maintenance: Network upgrade taking place from 10pm tonight (Tuesday 12 November)

There is a planned upgrade of the network infrastructure taking place tonight (Tuesday 12 November) from 10pm. The planned work will move our Trust from our current 1Gb connection over to a 5Gb connection offering improvements in network capacity and speed.
Maintenance will also take place on the Trust’s secure remote access system from 10pm and may result in a short 5 – 10 minute outage for users.

The work is planned to begin at 10pm and is planned to be completed by 10:30pm.

There is no network outage expected as systems should automatically switch to backup network connections but users may notice a slight degradation in service whilst work is carried out.
Colleagues are reminded to ensure that they are aware of their business continuity processes and the location of their downtime boxes in the event of any other unexpected downtime.

You will be informed by a desktop alert 15 minutes before work begins and once again when the upgrade has been completed.
Any issues should be escalated to your line manager who will in turn inform the Duty Manager.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Heartbeat: Putting the ‘fun’ in fundraising

Whilst fundraising used to be shaking a tin in the hope that someone would drop a few coins in, you’ll no doubt be aware that Your Trust Charity have been breaking away from the outdated traditions and have had a flurry of fantastic fun fundraisers.

From Bristnall Hall Academy students joining forces with West Midlands Fire Service for the day to launch a spectacular car wash to amazing feats of human endurance with colleagues across the Trust climbing mountains, running across London and jumping out of airplanes – all in aid of our very own Your Trust Charity.

Not all fundraising has to be hard work, hair raising or white-knuckle, some can be family friendly, relaxed and enjoyable and that’s exactly the spirit the community heart failure and respiratory teams had in mind when on a warm sunny evening in June a 27 strong team took on an informal 5k challenge around Sandwell Valley Park in West Bromwich.

Sharing her thoughts on the run, Community Heart Failure Specialist Nurse Jacqui Elson-Whittaker said, “It was an informal, private fundraising event for the community heart failure and respiratory teams, respected trust funds aiming to raise money for patient specific equipment. It also demonstrated how the two teams have integrated, not only sharing care for community patients and their families, but looking after our health and wellbeing in the wonderful outdoors.”

With their fantastic fun run completed, the community heart failure team and respiratory team managed to raise over £500.

Alcohol Awareness Week – join us at Arches this Thursday

As part of Alcohol Awareness Week, our alcohol team has been out in force at Sandwell Hospital promoting healthier alternatives.

If you missed out on tasting an alcohol-free tipple then head over to City Hospital on Thursday 14 November near the Archers restaurant where the alcohol team will be handing out some more samples throughout the day.

Tamsin Radford celebration today

Tamsin Radford, consultant (occupational therapy) will be leaving the Trust this week after a decade at the Trust.

She will be hosting a celebration event today (Tuesday 12 November) at Sandwell Hospital, Berridge room, courtyard gardens, 1pm – 2pm for colleagues to drop-in and say goodbye.

For more information please contact h.begum5@nhs.net.

Health and safety videos – sharps safety

Our health and safety team have recently added new videos to their training resource which aims to give colleagues clear and concise guidance on best practice in connection with a number of health and safety topics.

The first of the series is in connection with sharps safety and the activation of safety devices on needles. These series of short videos demonstrate the safety mechanisms built into sharps that are in common use within the Trust.

You can access these videos by clicking the link below.

https://connect2.swbh.nhs.uk/under-a-minute/

Support the Living Wage – download the CoGo app

It’s Living Wage Week and we are pleased to share the CoGo app to help you to choose Living Wage businesses and outlets to use, and to help us to make it clear that our economy must not depend on a low wage model if we are to thrive as a city and a region.

CoGo helps you on your sustainability and ethics journey. The app is about making ethical and sustainable living easy by helping consumers discover businesses that are taking action on issues they care about.

CoGo is compatible with both iPhones and Android handsets, and is available to download from the Apple Appstore as well as the Google Playstore.

Please see CoGo information sheet for further details.

Mandatory workplace fire safety training – have you completed yours?

If you are yet to complete your workplace fire safety training, please see below dates. All sessions will last 1 hour and should be booked via ESR.

Note: These sessions are for non-clinical colleagues only. Clinical colleagues should contact the fire safety team on ext. 4339 in regards to completing their workplace fire safety training.

For more information please contact swb-tr.SWBH-Team-FireSafetyTrainers@nhs.net.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 8 November

Next week is Living Wage Week across the country. You will remember that in 2017 the Trust decided to pay the Living Wage, thereby in effect abolishing Agenda for Change bands 1 and much of 2.  We then sought accreditation for this wider work with our supply chain and became the only local NHS body to achieve Living Wage accreditation. Both within our Black Country and West Birmingham STP, and now through the city-wide publicity next week, we are hoping to get many, many others involved.  88,000 people in Birmingham are in work but paid below a living wage. Many others are out of work. Because the public sector is a huge employer, and a huge buyer of goods, we have a real reach to change this position. In an NHS with a long term plan focused on inequalities and on the broader causes of ill health, it must be right to focus on the impact for individuals and families of poverty. Look out for details next week in staff communications of resources to help you to choose Living Wage businesses and outlets to use, and to help us to make it clear that our economy must not depend on a low wage model if we are to thrive as a city and a region.

I want to thank everyone involved this last week in work to safely discharge patients. Phlebotomists, patient transport staff, many doctors and nurses, site practitioners, on-call managers, social workers and care home staff. To make winter work well we need to discharge over 370 adult medical patients each week from our acute beds. And that assumes we can hold admissions below 50 a day.  That can create a sense of undue pressure to make poor decisions, and it can create tension between individuals and teams. I very much hope we are finding the right balance where you work.  However, the question cannot now be ‘who can be discharged today?’ it must include consideration of ‘if we need to safely discharge x patients today, who can we support beyond our wards?’ That is where we are fortunate to have an integrated Trust, to have good relationships with partner agencies, and to have reach into the homes and communities we work within. This is a balance of risk between the patient we know and can wrap a package around, and the patient just being collected into an ambulance and brought our way.  To maintain winter safety we will continue to prioritise getting ambulances back on the road, and continue to focus on timely discharge and moves between wards to achieve that.

From Monday anyone needing to understand or access the adult community wrap around services (our Integrated Hub) we offer, can simply call 0121 507 2664  – 7 days a week 08.00-18.00  Our Sandwell based adult community teams will then not only connect you to our services, but to those of Birmingham Community Trust too.  When we analyse the use of our community teams by our own hospital based services it is really clear there are scope to do much, much more to support people back in their own home, with their family, in a social setting. When we discuss frailty, or the degradation of someone’s independence through being in a bed for days and nights on end, it is vital we make best use of both admission avoiding and discharge enabling resources. Think too about which tests are truly needed prior to discharge, and which results could be reviewed after someone has gone home. The risks of corridor care for a newly arrived patient are highly likely to be greater than the risks of home follow up of a last, final day blood test for someone we have looked after for four days.

I am conscious that our conversation, and the national discussions, tends very much to focus on winter as an adult, often older persons, ‘event’. Yet seasonal variation in children’s services is far, far larger as a proportion of summer as we move into winter. That is why we have always had a winter bed base. From Wednesday this week we have begun the process of changing our children’s services at City. By March 2020 that will mean that D19, our paediatric assessment unit, will move down to be run alongside our assessment unit for children in A&E. That will bring together staff and allow us to run a genuine 24-7 children’s service, as we will do in Midland Met.  t also means that we will be much stricter, or tighter, about transferring children who need to spend more than a day with us to our childrens’ wards at Sandwell. We will bring on line more beds for that purpose but we will also be working to make sure we have the staffing, expertise, and equipment to support sicker kids in HDU level beds, as well as to introduce CPAP, and in time BIPAP, services. It must be right, as the NHS, including @SWBHnhs, talks about who is cared for in a bed who may be better cared for elsewhere, that we invest and support better services for the residual more complex patients we serve, who then make up a larger proportion of our inpatients. You know that in 2015 we invested in CCOT, in 2017 we opened dedicated NIV and surgical monitoring beds, and that in 2018 our critical care services were rated as outstanding. This gearing up will continue, in parallel with a focus on enhanced community based options.

These plans are all about patients, but their huge constraint will always be staffing. If you follow the Trust’s social media presence, you will know about recruitment work that continues. I published new guidance for line managers here last week. We absolutely have to welcome new starters and make sure that they the support they need to understand our communities, the team environment, and how to use our equipment and our IT. Everyone in the Trust can play a part in that welcome.

This Sunday is Remembrance Day. There are ceremonies and services advertised in our communication bulletins, but please do take a moment to reflect for yourself even if you are at work, or to listen to someone’s own reminiscence. At a time of conflict in many parts of the world, from Kashmir to Syria, Uganda and Mali, we need to work ever harder to support people impacted by war and destruction. You will be aware perhaps of the work done by teams across the Trust with refugee communities. That emphasis continues as we look to create fair access and dedicated services suitable to those needing our help.

My congratulations to everyone involved in last week’s Diwali Celebrations Trust-wide. The countdown is inevitably on for Christmas too, which means that arrangements are in hand for our annual decorations contest. Your team can get up to £50 towards decorations and can enter the contest by contacting Katherine.Bayley@nhs.net. There are of course prizes, and with the decorations staying up through the festive season, there is a lasting impact for people spending their Christmas with us. The judging will be on Friday 20^th, to leave Monday 23^rd December free for what will need to be the largest day of safe discharge of 2019!

Finally, if this message, if Heartbeat, if myConnect, are not enough to satiate your need to know, and to be entertained, we now have @radioSWB online Trust-wide and world-wide. This has been a long journey, and not just to get reliable WiFi. The volunteers behind the station need your support.  They are sharing musical favourites, conversations, requests and the odd corporate message to a headset near you. Give them a go!

#hellomynameisToby