Monthly archives: February 2020

Star of the Week – Cath Price, Labour Ward Manager

This week’s Star of the Week has been awarded to a Labour Ward Manager who has gone above and beyond in supporting colleagues to transition in to her department.

Cath Price, Labour Ward Manager was nominated for the weekly Star Award by her colleague Charlotte Duhig for the support she had given Charlotte as she began working on the Labour Ward.

Nominating Cath for the award, Charlotte wrote, “I was very nervous and daunted about my new role as band 7 development. Cath and the team on Labour Ward made the transition from working in low risk maternity care to high risk very smooth.

Cath took time every shift to make sure I was coping and ensure my learning was on track.

The team on Labour Ward were so supportive and encouraging giving me feedback and taking time to discuss problems I encountered.

Cath is a fabulous team manager with an open door policy, she always makes time to listen even though she has a large work load, always smiling and constantly caring.”

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Health and wellbeing support workshops: Introduction to managing anger and frustration

This three hour session provides you with information about the symptoms of anger, suggestions of managing your response and ways to reduce its every impact on us.

Learning outcomes include to understand the emotion ‘Anger’, to recognise the physical, emotional and psychological effects of anger, to identify the long term effects of anger, to evaluate current anger management techniques and to learn constructive responses to anger.

Date: Tuesday 3 March
Venue: The Berridge Room, Courtyard Gardens, Sandwell Hospital
Time: 10am – 1pm

To book onto any of the workshops please contact Jatinder Sekhon or Emma Williams on 0121 507 3306 option 4. Other dates, sessions and venues are available.

Heartbeat: Bricks and mortar build hearts and minds

Whilst Midland Met is amongst one of the biggest building projects undertaken by our Trust, you would be wrong to assume it’s the only project underway. Across the organisation, teams of architects, colleagues in estates are working hard to turn piles of bricks and mortar into facilities to save lives and transform care.

At Sandwell Hospital, behind the railing and the hoardings surrounding what was previously porta-cabins and car parking spaces, you can see the foundations being laid to form what will be the new Carters Green Medical Centre, boasting 20 consulting rooms and serving over 15,000 patients, the 6 million pound centre will transform GP led care for the local community.

Similarly at City Hospital changes that have long been in discussions are quickly coming to fruition to ensure that we can continue providing the best care possible. Neonatal has now reopened its newly revamped unit with a spacious high dependency unit and critical care has returned to its base on the ground floor following a refurbishment.

To find out more about the changes taking place across the Trust, Heartbeat caught up with Jayne Dunn, Director of Commissioning for Midland Met and Retained Estates to find out more, she said, “It’s fair to say 2020 is a transformation year, colleagues will see that we’re now delivering on the plans that we have been long developing, with many service moves having taken place in 2019 and more planned for 2020, these new facilities are set to help us deliver on our care promises.

“At City, we’ve recently relocated our fracture clinic to the Birmingham Treatment Centre and work is now underway to create an integrated children’s emergency department and paediatric assessment unit so that our young patients presenting at the hospital are able to be seen and treated promptly.”

Alongside the redevelopment of clinical spaces for urgent and emergency frontline services, the estates team have also been hard at work creating new facilities for planned diagnostic services. A new MRI suite has been set up on the ground floor of the Birmingham Treatment Centre and the team supported the arrival of a brand new CT scanner on the first floor of the Birmingham Treatment Centre. The new scanner will reduce waiting times for patients as well as improvements in speed and accuracy of scans.

Heartbeat: Argh me hearties! Shiver me timbers – there’s a new pirate ship in town

Ten years ago, Sandwell Day Nursery was gifted a pirate ship to celebrate their 30th birthday. Over the years it’s been the centre of the playground with little pirates having lots of swashbuckling fun.

Sadly, at the end of last year, the much-loved pirate ship was out of use due to wear and tear. Hearing of the news John Robinson and Stuart MacGregor from our estates team, with support from Andrew Mould, set about building a fort complete with a slide.

Taking just over a week to build, John and Stuart constructed the fort between jobs. John commented: “Stuart and I heard about the pirate ship and thought that we could use our skills to create something new for the children to enjoy. Knowing how much fun they all have playing outside we wanted to do something special for them. Andrew supported us and allowed us to use the time between jobs to work on this which we’re thankful for.”

Emma Collier, Day Nursery Manager told Heartbeat what a difference the new fort has had. “The children love it. Once again they have a dedicated space outside that

they can climb, run and jump on. It’s had a positive impact and we’re touched by the kindness and generosity shown by John and Stuart.”

Female genital mutilation study day

We will be hosting female genital mutilation study days aimed all clinical colleagues from 9am – 4.30pm on the following dates:

• Parent education room, maternity unit, City Hospital: Monday 18 May and Monday 5 October
• Education Centre – room 12, Sandwell Hospital: Friday 5 June

For booking and information please contact Alison.byrne8@nhs.net.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 21 February

On Tuesday next, our clinical leadership executive will discuss priorities for medical and clinical equipment purchase.  We will be investing more than £2m again in 2020 to update, replace and improve services, with recommendations from the team led by Lawrence Barker.  All of us can usually think of gaps or omissions in what we have to do our work but I hope you are encouraged that our hard work allows us to make these decisions and get the kit we need quickly.  If you are reading this and listing all the kit you don’t have, get in touch.  Before we spend anything we will go back through the risk register to make sure we are addressing your highest rated concerns:  Image storage in BMEC for example!

Cleaning our equipment, whether it is mattresses or drip stands, or anything else, matters too. Review this week with our senior nursing team suggests we have real work to do in March to get this consistently right.  Part of our regime to improve care but also to meet CQC standards will be ensuring that every ward and clinical department is up to date each week with cleaning schedules. Something can get missed, but each team needs a plan and a checklist for a set of tasks that could be everyone’s job, not just our excellent ward service officers.  I wrote here last week about perhaps controversial changes we are making in office cleaning, and the review this week of clinical areas brought home to me again the need to tilt our emphasis to get patient-facing cleaning right.  It’s a habit.  And one we need to have.

Our medical director, David Carruthers, was on hand this week to do the honours with our Star of the Week. Labour Ward manager Cath Price was nominated by her colleague and fellow midwife Charlotte Duhig for the support she provided as Charlotte joined the team.

The developing situation with Coronavirus remains a concern to us all.  Our PODs for assessment are now in place near each ED, and we issued this week revised guidance for the triage and treatment of children.  If you are unsure of our processes or protocols please ask.  That “speak up” message applies too if you are fearful of yourself working with patients who might have the virus, as our approach expects that all clinical employees will be able to undertake such care.  As we have advised before it is important to ensure that, even where someone’s travel history includes the most effected countries, we examine all options as well as this condition as confirmed cases in the UK remain thankfully rare.  I want to thank teams in ED and infection control for what is currently a lot of work to make ready and also to care for individual folk who arrive and need our help.

Next week’s Board Public Health, Community Development and Equality committee will re-discuss interpreting provision.  The Trust is so fortunate to have some fantastic interpreting staff on our bank, and access to language line, on which I sense there are mixed views.  But review of data for our use suggests that take-up is really patchy.  It is clear there are real practical issues faced by frontline teams in using these services and we are sometimes resorting to using family members to translate, which is fraught with risk and directly contradicts our longstanding policy and guidance.  During 2020 we will start work to tackle this, as we aim by 2021 to be sure that every person we care for can indeed understand their consultation and we can hear their voice properly.  If you do have ideas in this area please do let me know.  In this Trust, with the communities we serve, we believe that it is right that we standout for excellence in supporting our patients, and you, to make sure we succeed.

You know that in 2019 we agreed to partner with Engie for future provision of some of our estate services.  Part of that collaboration is developing our Energy and Sustainability work.  We want to achieve net carbon zero status as a Trust, and to work to support sustainable green transport and energy consumption in our system.  As it happens the whole NHS is about to launch something similar.  We have made good progress holding energy consumption and cost just about level over recent years, and as the grid itself becomes greener our use does too.  Notwithstanding that it was exciting to see funding given for local canals as an energy source and we are looking at geothermal options and others inside the Trust, before pricing the offset costs (tree planting mainly) we will need to meet for the remaining fossil fuel consumption that we have.  There is still work we can do on misuse and we are looking at how smart technology adjusts room lighting and temperature for use.  At the same time, we are discussing our collaboration with National Express to consider how bus networks and routes can be better integrated with our sites as they move to a wholly sustainable fleet which could offer many people a better, cheaper and faster route to and from work, or in the case of patients and visitors an improved journey to our care.  Of course first we should consider whether face to face care is necessary, and what we can do locally not in a central site location.  As that implies the subject is one that has the potential to turn upside down some of what we have long done, and as we develop our 2025 ambitions as a Trust we need to examine from first principles the model of care that we use and the whole community impact of how we work.

Heartbeat’s out next week.  We no longer issue paper payslips as you will know, so you can get your remuneration information by logging into your ESR record (everyone we employs has except just less than 300 people; so we know it works).  You can do that from your desktop, laptop, home computer or mobile phone by going to https://my.esr.nhs.uk/

These changes mean you need to search for your copy of our monthly magazine or look online.  If there are no Heartbeat copies near you do get in touch with comms as the post room team are working through our new delivery schedule!  We very much want to keep you involved and informed and will continue with paper copies despite the environmental impact.  The February Heartbeat issue has more on the Year of the Midwife and Nurse at the Trust, as well as lots on our University hospital.

If you have missed our February film explaining our future site changes, take a look here https://youtu.be/mOmyEChBHdE

#hellomynameisToby

Heartbeat: Sandwell Day Nursery celebrates 40 years’ of service award

Sandwell Day Nursery are jumping for joy after being recognised for 40 years’ of outstanding service.

Our nursery was given this prestigious Sandwell Long Service Recognition Award at the Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council’s childcare celebration event held at the end of 2019. The award itself is courtesy of the Sandwell Early Years team who are part of Sandwell Council, with the awards ceremony being organised jointly by Sandwell Early Years team and Sandwell Family Information Service.

Emma Collier, Day Nursery Manager, was delighted when the nursery won the award. She said: “I was overjoyed to hear we had won such a fantastic award!

To be shortlisted for an award is one thing but to be recognised for offering great service for four decades is truly remarkable.”

She added: “We have a superb team at the day nursery and I believe without their hard work and dedication we would not have won this award.”

The Day Nursery are no strangers to winning awards having taken home no less than three awards since the inception of the awards evening in 2007.

Kay Churchill, Day Nursery Manager echoes Emma’s thoughts and said: “I would like to thank all my colleagues past and present who have contributed towards our success as without them we wouldn’t have been able to attain such a significant award.”

Congratulations to our Sandwell Day Nursery for winning the Sandwell Long Service Recognition Award for 40 years’ of service!

Unity essential maintenance this weekend: Single document capture affected

Essential maintenance will be being carried out on Unity on Sunday 23 February between midnight and 4am which will affect single document capture.

Unity will remain online and operational during this period, however the single document capture function to scan documents directly in to Unity as well as archived reports will be unavailable during this period.

If you experience any other issues with Unity during this maintenance period that affect your ability to continue using the system, please ensure you  escalate to your line manager who will in turn inform the Duty Manager.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Experiencing grief and loss workshop

This is a structured course aimed at anybody who would like to learn self-help techniques in dealing with bereavement. We will be exploring our understanding of grief and skills to cope with loss. Areas will involve making good use of your time, considering activities that can help to keep you busy, and taking steps to a healthy lifestyle. Come along to learn some new skills and chat with people who are in similar situations to support each other through this difficult time.

• Date: Thursday 26 March
• Venue: The Berridge Room, Courtyard Gardens, Sandwell Hospital
• Time: 1.30pm – 4.30pm

Please contact Jatinder Sekhon or Emma Williams to arrange an appointment on 0121 507 3306,  option 4.

Heartbeat: Peer review awards procurement with national accreditation

Procurement has a key role to play in supporting the delivery of high-quality patient care whilst ensuring value for money is achieved. It is with this in mind that our procurement team recently undertook and successfully obtained their level 1 accreditation.

Working through a peer review the team were assessed against six key areas:

1. Strategy and organisation
2. People and skills
3. Strategic procurement
4. Supply chain, data
5. Systems and performance management
6. Policies and procedures

To achieve the accreditation the procurement team were tasked with collecting evidence to support the six key areas as well as a full assessment day led by Mike Hanson, Director of Procurement, Paul Mellor, Assistant Director of Procurement and Dinah McLannahan, Acting Director of Finance.

“We faced numerous challenges whilst trying to attain the accreditation as it was quite an intense and time-consuming process,” explained Paul.

“Getting the accreditation has helped us to identify gaps in processes we have so while this initially required a lot of work to update, going forward it will be extremely beneficial for the department.”

Within the accreditation process, there are three levels which are level 1 building, level 2 achieving and level 3 excelling which can only be achieved in order.

Dinah believes the building accreditation is a real positive for procurement. She said: “Procurement obtaining their level 1 is a fantastic step in the right direction because as an organisation we can now say we are a level 1 accredited Trust which is vital in regards to NHS Improvement. Also, the accreditation will improve the Trust’s procurement league table position as a level 1 holds a weighting within the league table itself.”

In 2020, our procurement team are aiming to obtain their level 2 accreditation which will only further improve processes within the department thus making improvements in our organisation.