Monthly archives: February 2023

Infection prevention and control review and support sessions

Colleagues are invited to join the upcoming IPC review and support session taking place on Tuesday 21 February from 9.30am – 12.30pm at the Hayward Lecture Theatre in City Site.

This is the perfect opportunity to showcase your ideas and experiences in improving IPC practice within your area.

If you’re looking to take up the link role for your area and have yet to join one of these sessions please call ext. 5900 and book in to join us.

Don’t miss out on this chance to connect with like-minded professionals and further your knowledge in IPC. To confirm your attendance, call ext. 5900.

Study to understand how healthcare organisations affect employees and contribute to burnout and wellbeing

In partnership with Teesside University and Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust, NHS-based Clinical Psychologist Jared Watson is conducting doctoral research to understand the fundamental ways that healthcare organisations cause burnout and promote wellbeing in staff. The study will also develop a ground-breaking questionnaire called the Emotional Climate in Organisations Scale which is based on the Three Circles Model from Compassion Focussed Therapy. This questionnaire will lead to a better understanding of the causes and treatment of burnout in healthcare staff, the conditions that promote wellbeing at work, as well as the psychological needs of staff.

Please consider completing this 10-minute survey. The survey is open to anyone who works in a healthcare setting regardless of your role. It is completely anonymous.  

To participate please click on the link in the attached poster, alternatively, you can click on the following link: ECOS Validation 2 (onlinesurveys.ac.uk)

The results of the study will be shared with all participating Trusts and via twitter in summarised form (twitter handle @jaredwats). The survey will remain open until May. If you have any questions, please email jared.watson@nhs.net.

TeamTalk briefing: Wednesday 22 February

TeamTalk is our monthly Trust-wide team briefing, it’s an opportunity for colleagues to hear about what’s happening in our organisation as well as putting their own questions forward.

Everyone is encouraged to join in with TeamTalk sessions, they’re not simply for managers. Sessions take place once a month and are hosted online – so colleagues who are ward based, working from home or simply want to stay up to date can join in.

The next session will take place on Wednesday 22 February, 1pm. Everyone is welcome to join.

Click here to join the meeting

Star of the Week – Sharon Bunce

Congratulations to our Star of the Week Sharon Bunce, Senior Ward Services Officer.

Sharon has been recoginsed for her hard work at Sandwell as a senior ward services officer. When we were recently dealing with an infection outbreak, she went above and beyond to get all the wards deep cleaned and turned around ready for admissions. Sharon plays an instrumental role in maintaining patient flow. Her work is invaluable, her efforts are instrumental to providing high quality patient care.

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.

Would you like to donate to victims of the earthquakes in Syria and Turkey?

A massive earthquake in Turkey and Syria has led to an urgent need for donations to support those affected with essentials.

If you have any of the following items you are willing to donate, please do so:

• Clothing – especially winter and layers
• Food tins and packets
• Baby nappies, bottles, bedding and essentials
• Toiletries

Our Trust will be passing on donated items to the Bearded Broz, a voluntary organisation based in Birmingham. Bearded Broz have pledged to take donations to Syria and Turkey.

Please ensure all donations are taken to Cancer Services, Hallam Building, Sandwell by Tuesday 21 February.

For more information, please call 0121 507 2776/2525.

Gifts and hospitality – Should you accept them or are you breaking the rules?

Colleagues at the Trust have worked incredibly hard, particularly through the pandemic, and it is right that your hard work is recognised. You may be offered gifts from patients, families, service users, contractors or suppliers or people that have no connection to the NHS. Do you know what can and cannot be accepted?

Be sure to complete this short quiz to find out what is and isn’t acceptable.

Note: The results of the quiz are completely anonymous. Provision of your job title and location allows us to focus any follow up awareness work. We will not use this information to locate any respondents.

Click here to complete the quiz.

Syringe driver training now available

T34 syringe driver training is now available via centric cortex. All colleagues who use syringe drivers should complete this training. Please follow directions from the T34 syringe driver course eLearning sheet to make sure you complete all the required elements.

For centric cortex issues please email swbh.informaticsbookings@nhs.net.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 10 February

We know that as an organisation we have a long way to go in achieving the levels of patient satisfaction, staff satisfaction, quality and efficiency that would enable us to be rated as ‘Good or Outstanding’ by our patients, staff, partners and the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

Highly successful organisations have developed an approach to continuously improving their organisations that involves all staff at all levels, every day being equipped and empowered to eliminate waste and improve experience and outcomes.  ‘Waste’ is typically defined by any action that does not add value to the service user. This approach originated in the 1940s at Toyota but in the last 20 years it has been successfully adapted and adopted in healthcare, too.

In the United States of America, the Virginia Mason Institute in Seattle and ThedaCare in Wisconsin have become world renowned leaders in healthcare improvement and the deployment of improvement systems to help their teams deliver their strategies.  In the UK, NHS Trusts such as the University Hospitals Sussex and Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust have been recognised as leading Trusts in this field.  Others, like Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, are not far behind. They have all created a culture of local ownership of issues and a culture of self-determined improvement in their front-line teams.

In the last 5 years NHS England have supported the adoption of Continuous Improvement systems in NHS Trusts.  The CQC assess how ‘well led’ an organisation is partly by the existence of an improvement system. Whilst neither organisation sets out how they expect NHS Trusts to implement or fund these improvement systems, nevertheless, guidance is coming imminently that will, in effect, mandate it.

At Sandwell and West Birmingham, we recognised the importance of having a Trust wide approach to improvement when developing our 2022-27 strategy and signalled this by including Continuous Quality Improvement as an enabler to the delivery of this strategy. This is all available on Connect and on our website. As a result, in September 2022, the Trust Board agreed for a project to go ahead to determine what SWB’s improvement approach should be and how it could be rolled out across the Trust.

Since September 2022,  the project group and senior leaders from across the Trust have explored what ‘Great looks like’ by researching published literature and speaking to and visiting experts in this area, including:

• • Trusts who have successfully developed their own approach
  • Partner organisations who can help Trusts develop their own approach

We now know that this desired approach is an improvement system that we would develop and brand, to make our own, that supports all staff to deliver improvement in an increasingly complex and opaque environment, with increased service pressures and ‘flat cash’ funding.

Our improvement system would help us to:

• Put the patient at the heart of everything that we do and deliver the Fundamentals of Care
• Align the whole organisation around what the most important priorities are each year
• Have a standard approach to the improvement work we do throughout the organisation
• Enable everyone to make change in their area or to work with colleagues to make broader change without referring to more senior leaders for permission or approval.

Last week the Trust Board spent a session learning more about the type of improvement system that we want to implement and our role in ensuring that it lives within the organisation forever.  They were excited by the opportunity that an improvement system would offer the organisation. Building on the session last week, a series of options will be presented to Trust Board in March, after which we can move on to planning our approach to delivery and procuring any external support we need to help us to implement our improvement system well.

What’s the ask of me?, I hear you say

• I ask that you are curious to learn and that you remain passionate about improving the care that we provide to our patients
• I ask that you make every effort to attend or listen in to any events about our improvement system, if you can
• I ask that you think about how proficient you would like to become at understanding our system and implementing improvements in our organisation and working with partners across our system.

Done right, I anticipate that knowing and living this system will be right at the heart of who we are and how we care for our patients, our people and our population. I believe that it will be weaved into our appraisal process and become a key skill requirement when seeking promotion into senior roles. As the Chief Executive of the Trust, I have now committed to the implementation of this system being one of my top priorities. I fundamentally believe we will not be able to meaningfully deliver our Fundamentals of Care, our financial recovery, our People Plan or our population health ambitions, without it.

Have a good week.

Parkrun for the NHS: 8 – 9 July

To mark the NHS’s 75th anniversary, NHS England has teamed up with parkrun UK and the NHS in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to host ‘parkrun for the NHS’ on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 July.

This is an opportunity for parkruns and their local communities to acknowledge the huge contribution that the NHS makes to the health of the nation and celebrate all the colleagues and volunteers, past and present, who have made the NHS what it is.

Help shape CQC’s new regulatory approach: 27 February

The CQC is looking for colleagues to sit on a steering group tasked with evaluating its new regulatory proposals.

The steering group will have an input on:

• What the CQC are planning and how we are delivering our transformational change
• Understand the potential impact changes will have to ensure the CQC are providing the right guidance and information at the right time

The next steering group meeting is Monday 27 February, 11am – 12pm.

To find out more and sign up please click here.