Monthly archives: September 2020

Salop Drive: support your local community and improve your wellbeing

Salop Drive is non-profit market garden which grows and sells produce to the local community. It produces a wide range of fruit and vegetables e.g. plums, apples, pears, kale, sweet peppers, corn, pumpkin, beetroot and much more besides.

You can purchase fruit and vegetable boxes from £5 upwards, just give them a ring, place your order and arrange to collect within their opening times. The staff are really friendly and very helpful!

At present they have a large supply of tomatoes and good amount of apples for sale alongside lovely sweet plums, beetroot, sweet peppers, courgettes, kale, carrots, butternut squash and more.

There is nothing better than fork to plate produce, for freshness, flavour and healthy fervour!

So support this local community market garden and improve your wellbeing.

Find out more at https://www.idealforall.co.uk/ or call 0121 558 5555.

Get involved, engaged and share your experiences!

We want to hear your experiences whether they are good, bad or indifferent. This could be simply about how you feel you have been treated by managers, fellow colleagues or the Trust when you have been going through difficult and challenging times. We’re encouraging both clinical and non-clinical colleagues to get involved and speak up to support the delivery of our Trust ambitions.

The purpose of this is to provide a mechanism for colleagues to be actively involved in the delivery of the key tenets of the Trust’s people ambitions in areas such as retention, inclusion and wellbeing with the aim of learning from the everyday experiences and interactions they encounter in work and looking at how we could improve those experiences.

Note: Any data will be dealt with confidentially, held securely and anonymised with key themes and lessons learned being shared in any reports or meetings to help inform decision making.

This is not intended to replace any existing formal mechanism for colleagues to voice their concerns.

If you wish to share your experiences with us please email swbh.staff-experience@nhs.net.

Heartbeat: An integrated approach to frailty at the front door

‘Providing the right care, in the right place at the right time’, is a term that’s often used in the NHS. One area it can make a significant impact in is when it comes to caring for our older patients who present at our hospitals – an issue that has been proven by our frailty at the front door work.

With an ageing population alongside high levels of deprivation and ill health in Sandwell and West Birmingham, it’s critical to ensure that when a frail older adult is admitted into our care that we act rapidly to ensure that therapy intervention and discharge planning begins as early as possible so the right level of care is in place and the patient begins their journey to discharge.

To find out more about the frailty at the front door project, Heartbeat caught up with Trainee Frailty Advanced Clinical Practitioner, Emma Hibbs.

She said: “Early intervention therapy is key when it comes to caring for our population, which is why the rapid response therapy service is in ED supporting colleagues to care for patients. Our teamwork has two primary aims in ED; admission prevention and early comprehensive therapy assessment.

“The rapid response therapy team are now well established in ED – acute medical assessment units and the older person’s assessment unit, work collaboratively as part of the multidisciplinary team and proactively manage patients across these units to provide therapy assessments and facilitate discharge planning.

“As a team, we have been able to continually evolve our assessments focusing on the quality of care we give to our patients. We screen for frailty using the clinical frailty scale, complete evidence based cognitive assessments such as the 4AT to screen for delirium and cognitive impairment and complete a thorough physical and functional assessment.

We know that admission to hospital and/ or prolonged acute inpatient stay can negatively impact function, overall patient outcomes, mortality, and whether patients return to their usual place of residence or not. We can have meaningful conversations about what matters to our patients to inform our assessment and management to ultimately provide holistic care.”

Emma added: “Since the project, we have made some exciting developments around the management of frailty at the front door with a successful project piloting a ‘frailty intervention team’ in ED in July. The primary aim of this team was to deliver comprehensive geriatric assessments facilitated by a core MDT group of clinicians. The pilot was a great success, and we look forward to hopefully establishing this service permanently in ED working towards a vision of a truly integrated front door approach to frailty.”

New flexible bus tickets with National Express

National Express are now offering new flexible bus tickets. For those that are travelling less frequently, these tickets may provide better value for money.

For more information, please visit https://nxbus.co.uk/west-midlands/tickets-prices/flexible-tickets

Star of the Week: Nargus Begum

Our Star of the Week this week is Nargus Begum, Community Nurse in the Oldbury district nurse team.

Nargus is a newly qualified community nurse who has progressed fantastically within her new role. She makes patients feel valued, safe and cared for.

Although newly qualified her work is thorough and she explores all aspect of advanced nursing care with a gentle approach that achieves best care.

She is compassionate to both patients and colleagues. She is committed to her job and patients and goes above and beyond to care for people.

Nargus has been observed and her patient care is outstanding – this has a great impact on patients she cares for and the overall morale within the team.

Throughout the pandemic Nargus has also gone the extra mile for her team and her patients. She has taken time to ensure that the team have adequate PPE supplies available at all times.

Do you know someone in your team that has gone above and beyond the call of duty? Why not put them forward for Star of the Week by clicking here.

Routine swabbing: A ‘how to’ guide

How a COVID-19 swab is collected and packaged is extremely important. Below is a quick ‘how to’ video that shows you the steps you need to take to safely collect and package a PCR swab for Coronavirus.

Please take the time to watch the video below and ensure you are familiar with the process.

Heartbeat: Trust retains TIDE silver award

SWB has successfully qualified for the Talent Inclusion and Diversity Evaluation (TIDE) silver award courtesy of the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion (ENEI).

This means the Trust has once again maintained its silver status. In total, 98 organisations participated in TIDEmark 2020 across 26 different sectors and two different regions.

TIDE is a self-assessment evaluation and benchmarking tool that measures an organisation’s approach and progress on diversity and inclusion in eight key areas:

• Workforce
• Strategy and plan
• Leadership and accountability
• Recruitment and attraction
• Training and development
• Other employment practices
• Communication and engagement
• Procurement

“I feel very proud of everyone who helped us keep this silver award. To have been ranked 21st out of 98 organisations and to get an overall score of 78 per cent is something special which should be celebrated,” said Raffaela Goodby, Director of People and Organisation Development.

“Having looked at the report and the eight key areas, as an organisation we did particularly well in the areas of strategy and plan, attraction and recruitment and communication and engagement attaining scores of 11, 11 and 20 respectfully. This makes me very happy as throughout the last 12 months or so we have made a conscious effort to improve in those areas specifically.

We plan to work closely with our staff networks, particularly on the Black Lives Matter agenda to improve all of these scores in our next evaluation.”

In addition, to being ranked 21st overall, the Trust was also ranked sixth out of 11 in regards to healthcare organisations and 16th out of 78 in the whole of Europe.

Raffaela believes it is a fantastic achievement for SWB to retain the silver award and added: “I would like to say congratulations to all our staff who were involved in any capacity in helping us retain this great accolade. Fingers crossed we can go one better next time and get gold!”

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 18 September

Clearly we are in our first week of increased restrictions both across the country and locally in Birmingham and Sandwell. I would echo what local authority leaders, public health directors and clinicians are assertively stating. We are seeing more cases in our communities as well as in our hospitals and these increases are serious and concerning. I want to be absolutely clear that abiding by these restrictions is essential. We all need to comply and challenge others where they are not complying. Hard as it is to stay away from other households, we need to show an example as well as ensuring that we protect each other and our friends and family.

Thank you to everyone for all you are doing to rigorously follow our swabbing and infection control processes when caring for patients, and for abiding by our mask usage, PPE guidelines, handwashing and social distancing policies. These are as important now as ever so please maintain your vigilance and stay alert. Our redirooms are being piloted currently; they are temporary, single-patient isolation rooms to isolate infectious patients under contact or droplet precautions. These are designed to assist with reducing transmission of infections and I trust will be a help in our isolation capacity.

I know that many of us may be affected by household isolation. We described this in our COVID-19 bulletin this week. If a member of your household tests positive for COVID-19 please self-isolate and stay at home. If a member of your household is isolating but has no symptoms, for instance due to a school bubble closure, then you are not required to isolate yourself but I recognise that caring responsibilities will have an impact. If this affects you please alert your line manager as soon as possible so that we can best support you. Accommodation can be made available for you near to work to assist.

Our Flu-per Trooper flu campaign is getting into gear. Protecting ourselves and others from flu this year is vital and you all know the reasons why. We expect to receive our vaccinations in the next few weeks and the key priority now is to make sure your team and service has sufficient peer vaccinators. They are crucial in our fight against flu and will take responsibility to jab colleagues. Signing up and doing the training is straightforward so please make sure you do this.

Earlier in the week, we hosted the West Midlands Mayor, Andy Street, who was invited by St Basils to view the live and work scheme, which is a great partnership between the Trust and the national charity that supports young people who are at risk of homelessness. People on the scheme are able to be housed in our own accommodation on site at Sandwell and work as an apprentice within the Trust. You will have heard the stories from individuals who have excelled in these roles and continue to develop their careers within the Trust and the wider NHS. We are grateful for the support of the Mayor who has long been a supporter of our Trust’s commitment to development and learning and supporting people through employment. This is life-changing work and we can take pride in the holistic way our Trust addresses health and wellbeing, doing what we can to support people with housing and employment as well as their clinical care and treatment. Our strong partnerships right across Sandwell and Birmingham are testament to that.

On Monday 21 September we celebrate Unity’s first birthday. I am sure that you, like me, cannot believe that a year has passed since the implementation. I am so proud of what we have achieved as a Trust in implementing this new system. We had over 6,000 people trained, over 600 digital champions and over 250 Quick Reference Guides created demonstrating how to carry out certain tasks. We have done something remarkable in implementing this system.

Despite the individual anxieties there may have been about ability to use the system, employees in this Trust took on the challenge, worked together on individual and team competencies, shared best practice with each other and have created safer services for our patients. Our IT services are now so much more resilient than they were and I want to thank the Informatics team for their huge efforts and the changes they have put in place to improve our IT reliability and functionality.

Our Trust, as you know, sets high ambitions and we want to further optimise our usage of Unity, so that the quality and safety of care continues to improve, freeing up more clinical time to care. We will be persistent in extracting as much benefit as possible from this system, so you will continue to see our Unity quick tips and optimisation data. This will, I hope, start to become a “business as usual” tool as part of managing services and performance and will improve consistency in patient care and treatment.

Today is the final day to cast your vote in our four employee/team of the year awards. Please make sure you take this opportunity to show your support for these fantastic colleagues to select our winners. Continuing with the theme of awards, I would like to congratulate this week’s Star of the Week, Nargus Begum, Community Nurse in the Oldbury district nurse team who was nominated by her grateful colleagues. Nargus is a relatively newly qualified nurse and has provided immense support to her team and patients throughout the pandemic, and proved an inspiration to all.

Star Awards 2020 – last day to make your vote count!

Today is the last day left to get your Star Awards 2020 votes in!

This years’ Star Awards will once again look to recognise those colleagues who go above and beyond the call of duty to help us provide great care and support to our patients.

This year we need your help in four of our colleague voted for categories which are:

• Employee of the Year
• Clinical Team of the Year (adults)
• Clinical Team of the Year (children’s)
• Non-clinical team of the Year

Voting will stay open until 5pm today (Friday 18 September). Please take the time to think about who has gone the extra mile and submit your votes.

Remember, you can only vote once for each category so make your vote count.

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Be sure to also check out this short video to see which of your colleagues have been shortlisted for the Star Awards 2020!

Saying your prayers safely

New social distancing and infection control measures have been put into place which will ensure the safety of those colleagues who wish to use the chapel and prayer rooms. Jummah (Friday) Prayers will resume this week in the chapels at Sandwell and the Birmingham Treatment Centre, with three time slots 1.15pm, 1.30pm and 1.45pm. Prayer times are staggered so that there are only a maximum number of people using the room at any one time.

At Sandwell 11 people will be allowed in at each time slot, whilst at City, 10 worshippers will be able to use the prayer room during each time slot. Volunteers will hand out face masks, and distribute hand sanitiser and a paper prayer mat to each individual using the facilities. Once the slot has ended, worshippers will be able to dispose of their paper prayer mat. Please note, there may be a wait due to the number of people wishing to use the space.

Christian services will resume shortly and more details about this will follow later this month. The Chapels at both sites remain open for individual worship and both rooms are set out to reflect social distancing measures.

The chaplaincy has continued to provide a service throughout the pandemic and every Sunday they light candles for colleagues and patients. If you would like a candle lit for a loved one who has passed away or is sick, please contact Mary Causer, Lead Chaplain, via email at mary.causer@nhs.net or call her on ext. 3552.