Monthly archives: February 2020
2019/20 flu campaign evaluation
Each year we offer colleagues the opportunity to have their flu vaccines. This year over 83 per cent of you took advantage of having your flu jab.
As our winter campaign draws to a close we’d like your feedback. We’ll be evaluating this year’s campaign to help us prepare for winter 2020. Please take a few moments to complete the short questionnaire – https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/KKMW3PJ
John Clothier sadly passed away – funeral 2 March
Former trauma and orthopaedic consultant, John Clothier – who devoted 26 years of his life to the trust – sadly passed away suddenly last month.
Nicknamed JC, he joined us in 1983 and although he retired in 2009, continued to involve himself with local health care services right up until last year.
Married with two grown up sons and five grandchildren, he collapsed at home with wife Sue and died at Sandwell A&E on Friday January 17, aged 75.
A committed, energetic and dedicated doctor, JC was also passionate about training doctors and nurses, regularly sponsoring and arranging their professional development. He mentored and trained many current T&O consultants.
Having studied first at Oxford University, then in London hospitals, he had no knowledge or experience of the Black Country when he started the job – and quickly fell in love with the place and its people, choosing to live in West Bromwich and regularly enjoying socialising with colleagues after work. He was particularly known for his jovial nature, his booming laugh often announcing his arrival long before he appeared.
Wishing to reflect his absolute belief in the importance of education, his family is setting up a trust for an annual award in T&O to recognise the best practices in training, research and development among the whole staff groups.
His funeral will be on Monday March 2nd at 2.30pm at Sandwell Crematorium.
All are warmly welcome, and please do spread the word to former colleagues who may not receive the news.
Order an electric car with Tusker before March 31 and get free charging installation
Say goodbye to the fuel pump and get an electric car through the Tusker benefit scheme.
Order a pure electric car with Tusker before 31 March and get a free charging point and standard installation at your home.
Note: Benefit in kind will be 0 per cent on zero-emission models from April 2020, rising by 1 per cent each year until April 2023.
To order you electric car today please email EET@tuskerdirect.com or call 0333 400 7431.
Heartbeat: Patient shares care experiences with board members
Patient, Clare Alsop, shared her experiences with the Trust Board in January, talking about the impact her condition and treatment had following her long-term care at the Trust.
Clare had an extremely rare skin condition and was admitted onto one of the medical wards at City Hospital. Her condition meant that her immune system was compromised and, knowing this, she requested a side room. At the time, Clare was not given a side room to move into. She subsequently contracted severe pneumonia and was cared for in critical care for nine weeks, requiring a tracheostomy. Clare moved to a medical ward for a further month and then on to Rowley Regis Hospital.
The medication and treatment caused significant side effects including hallucinations that were extremely disturbing for Clare. On transfer to the medical ward from critical care, Clare was extremely concerned.
Talking about her experience, Clare said: “There were a lot of positives but some negatives. The critical care outreach team were absolutely brilliant in acting really quickly and I had excellent care in critical care. I felt very safe. Communication was a bit of a problem as I couldn’t talk so it was difficult to make people understand what I was feeling. I hallucinated a lot due to the medication and that was terrifying.”
Clare continued, “Once I was well enough to leave critical care, I moved back to a medical ward and I was really worried about that transition. I was still experiencing hallucinations and I don’t think the staff understood the impact of these hallucinations as I was shouting out at night a lot and was threatened to stop or I could be removed by security.”
“I felt that I needed a lot more emotional and mental health support that wasn’t available to help me come to terms with the whole experience.”
Chief Executive, Toby Lewis, asked what sort of mental health support would have been useful and Clare expressed her view that someone who could sit and listen to you, such as a trained counsellor who understood critical care, would have been helpful.
The Board members thanked Clare for being brave enough to share her story. Paula Gardner, Chief Nurse, explained that a lot had changed for the better since Clare’s hospital stay including easy-press call bells in critical care and visits from the receiving medical ward teams to critical care patients and their families to help with transition.
Have your say – 2020 travel survey
There is still time to take part in the annual staff travel survey to gather information on travel habits – https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/SWBStaffTravelSurvey2020
It’s important that we encourage and support colleagues in moving towards more sustainable and active modes of travel, like car sharing, using public transport and low emission vehicles, walking and cycling.
Those that complete the survey will be entitled to a FREE day saver ticket for use on National Express buses (subject to availability). There’s also a chance to win £50 worth of Amazon vouchers.
For more information please contact francesca.silcocks@nhs.net.
Sandwell climate change consultation
Climate Change and poor air quality in Sandwell is a serious public health issue, so colleagues in public health are gearing up to tackle air pollution in our area, and we’re working alongside them on this. They need you to share your thoughts and ideas by taking part in this online survey: www.sandwell.gov.uk/climatechange
They’re carrying out an eight-week public consultation on climate change and air quality for Sandwell, and want as many local people as possible to have their say on how to help make Sandwell a carbon neutral place by 2041. This target has been agreed by the West Midlands Combined Authority, who have set out the evidence behind this decision in ‘Setting Climate Change Commitments for West Midlands Combined Authority Area’.
The consultation on the proposed Air Quality Strategy and Draft Climate Change Strategy will run for eight weeks until Sunday 15 March.
You can read about the proposed plans and summary document online. The 35 actions detailed in this consultation have been based on research undertaken by Ashden and Friends of the Earth to identify the most effective steps to take.
Diabetes training for HCAs: 1 April
This training is for both community and hospital based HCAs who are new to the Trust or have little or no knowledge of diabetes.
The training will take place at the Sandwell Education Centre – room 13, 9.30am-11.30am.
For more information and specifics about the training please see HCA diabetes training information sheet.
Please confirm your attendance via email to anitakaur@nhs.net proving a contact number.
Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 7 February
Yesterday’s Trust Board in the Hayward Room at City Hospital heard from Saurav Bhardwaj, specialty lead for A&E, alongside Helen Mallard and Amandeep Tung, as we explored how best to help emergency care to meet the rising challenges of an ageing population. I know that furore over coronavirus adds a further challenge to managing ambulance and walk in arrivals. And towards the end of this year, subject to consultation with local residents, we expect to take over responsibility for the Parsonage Street Walk-In Centre. It’s busy, so it is good news that recruitment is now going really well. Our first graduate of the Trust’s in-house CESR programme has become a substantive consultant, and we are starting to feel better staffed much of the time.
Heartbeat hit the streets last week with a headline about general practice that marks a real milestone for the Trust. When we think about major health challenges like screening uptake, late pregnancy presentation, managing long term conditions, or better investing in mental health, we want to be working hand in hand with primary care. Many patients will continue to be looked after by GPs in the traditional manner, but for one in ten local people, they have now got the option of registering with a GP who is part of the Trust. That practice can still refer anywhere else, of course, but I would hope over time we can shape our services better to fit the needs of residents served by the Your Health Partnership primary care network.
That theme of joining up services applies too to care homes. Aided by experts like Professor Dan Lasserson, one of our acute physicians, and a professor at the University of Birmingham, we are looking to take our historic involvement with local care homes one step further. Around half of all local care home residents typically have a hospital admission each year. In 2020/21 we plan to invest in a major research programme that looks to in essence prevent all such transfers. Part of that work is about advanced care planning towards the end of life, but it is also about how we connect medics and other disciplines into care homes and make different decisions about where we provide care. When we think about next winter this work has the potential to change colleague and patient experience, and as the work evolves we will keep you posted. NHS winters do not have to be the way they are!
Our Board visiting programme focused mostly this week on neonates and paediatrics. It was fantastic to see the new NNU facilities we opened just before Christmas, and we look forward to the dedicated emergency care for children unit that will open in early spring at City. Our patient story yesterday highlighted some of the challenges families face in our busy emergency departments and I know that we are working to get it right each and every time. Children and young people’s services are one of the areas where we want to show the Care Quality Commission later this year the Good work being done by teams. I walked away from our visits encouraged by the enthusiasm and team work on display. Recruitment in neonates for example should allow us to hit the BAPM standards in 2020-21 and the enthusiasm of professionals from all disciplines for that standard was really clear. New facilities can bring new pride and a new chance to do things that we have always striven to do.
As the picture at the top of the page shows, the Board visits also gave me chance to present our latest Star of the Week award, to Tracy Weston on D21. A few different nominations have come in for Tracy and one in particular focused on her work to make the very best use of Care Planning within Unity. Talking to Tracy’s colleagues, including the kind lady who reminded me to wash my hands (great job!), it was clear how much work has put in to building the knowledge of the whole team in this area. Unity implementation, or optimisation, has always been rightly viewed as a middle distance race not a sprint, and I know we have work to do in the next few weeks to make sure, especially for medication administration and reconciliation, that we are sharing best practice between teams and getting it right.
Next week is not just Valentine’s Day but also another milestone week for our new hospital, and sees more publicity and work on our AI programme. With national funding bids due in, and the Trust very much at the forefront of work on using artificial intelligence, there is real scope for us to move at pace to get great digital technology into our organisation. I know we still have issues, and our PACs upgrade and storage changes in BMEC are pending, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that we will end 2019-20 in an incomparably better place with our IT than we began the year. This week I received an NHS-wide edict telling me to urgently move our external connections to an HSCN format, only to be able to write back and point out that we did just that ten months ago. IT investment will continue and Heartbeat this month profiles on pages 12-13 some of the leaders who are driving forward our IT department. If you are reading this and do not know who serves on the digital committee for your clinical group then do pipe up and ask your group director of operations (Tina, Beth, Jonathan, Mel or Mandy…). Digital ambition is not the preserve of the interested, or the Board, or a few people, but is something that is absolutely mainstream for us all – so do please get your information governance training done if you are not yet compliant!
Finally, this week we confirmed that Liam Kennedy will take over as Chief Operating Officer in March when Rachel Barlow starts her new role as our director of system transformation. That post takes on the estate brief, is responsible for the equipping, commissioning and completion of Midland Met and in particular for making sure that our clinical model for acute care changes ready for 2022. Over the next couple of months there are other changes within the Board team and I would expect by April to be able to include within Heartbeat the Trust structure and senior leadership arrangements through to 2023.
#hellomynameisToby
Building emotional resilience workshop
The Trust is pleased to be hosting a three hour accredited workshop to understand what emotional resilience is, what impacts our emotional resilience and ways to improve our resilience through stress management techniques, time management and change management.
- Thursday 20 February 2020
- Surgical Skills Room, Postgrad, City Hospital
- 30pm – 4.30pm
To book onto any of this workshop, please contact Jatinder Sekhon or Emma Williams on 0121 507 3306, option 4.
Star of the Week – Tracy Weston, Ward Sister
This week’s Star of the Week has been awarded to a ward sister who has gone above and beyond in supporting her colleagues to get to grips with Unity.
Tracy Weston, Ward Sister was nominated for the weekly accolade by Health Informatics Matron Sharon Reynolds who was pleasantly surprised whilst supporting Tracy with some Unity Training.
Nominating Tracy for the award, Sharon wrote, “I have sat with Tracy today to complete her training on accessing live safety plan data. During the session we reviewed patients risk assessments and care plans. Her staff clearly have a good understanding of Unity and the workflows as her patients all had care plans initiated and were being used to document nursing care. This is the first ward I have seen use the care plans in Unity really well.”
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