Monthly archives: October 2023
Changes to Bus route 89
Bus 89 will no longer be running from West Bromwich to Birmingham. This bun will be running from West Bromwich to Bearwood via Rutland Road, Sandon Road, and Portland Road vice versa.
These changes will commence from 5 November.
Bus 89 is no longer running down St Pauls Road, Devonshire Road, and is no longer servicing the Uplands and Hales Lane Smethwick.
If you have any further enquiries regarding this route, please contact National Express 0121 254 7272
Occupational Therapy Week – join us at Sandwell on 7 November
Occupational therapy is one of the allied health professions that helps people of all ages who have physical, sensory, or cognitive problems. Occupational Therapy Week aims to increase awareness of and celebrate the essential service occupational therapists provide in helping patients regain independence in all areas of their lives. This year’s Occupational Therapy Week will be celebrated between 6 – 12 November.
To celebrate Occupational Therapy Week, we will be hosting a special Occupational Therapy Week drop in event on Tuesday 7 November at Sandwell Education Centre from 10am – 3pm for all colleagues to attend.
For more information please email jannine.hall@nhs.net.
Empowering patients to manage chronic breathlessness
Many people live with chronic breathlessness and often feel helpless, believing nothing can be done to relieve the symptom. However, there are many self-management techniques that can make a difference, allowing people to feel more in control, confident and able to get on with their daily lives.
A free online course is now available that aims to help health professionals understand how chronic breathlessness can still be improved even when the underlying condition cannot. The training takes approximately 20 minutes to complete and is relevant for any health professional who looks after people with long-term conditions causing chronic breathlessness. This includes nurses, therapists, advanced practitioners, doctors and psychologists working in primary care, community care and secondary care.
Long-term conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart failure can cause breathlessness that persists even when the underlying condition is being medically managed as well as possible. Upon completion of the training you will have learned some practical tips to manage the symptom, and you will have considered other sources of support for people living with chronic breathlessness.
The training has been developed as part of the NHS England Respiratory Long Term Plan Breathlessness Management workstream, to support colleagues with easily accessible education around non-pharmacological self-management support for people living with chronic breathlessness.
To find out more and access the training, please visit the Managing Chronic Breathlessness programme page.
October is Speak Up Month
As you may be aware October is Speak Up Month. Freedom to Speak Up is for everyone who works here.
Speaking up enhances all our working lives and improves the quality and safety of care. Listening and acting upon matters raised means that Freedom to Speak Up will help us be a great place to work.
Speak Up Month in October is an opportunity to raise awareness of how much we value speaking up in our organisation. We see speaking up as fundamental to how we work, and we want to be part of making speaking up business as usual across SWB.
Be sure to check out this short video featuring Jamie Emery, patient insight and involvement lead talking about being a freedom to speak up guardian.
To find out more about how to speak up at SWB and our guardians, please click here.
Meet our guardians in your ward or area: Our Guardians will be visiting different parts of the Trust on the following dates:
- Friday 27 October, Sandwell
- Monday 30 October, City
Major severe service disruption affecting multiple IT services
Informatics are aware of a number of services which have been unavailable since approximately 10.30am today (Thursday 26 October). Please divert to use business continuity planning for these service whilst we continue to investigate and remedy the incident.
The following are known services impacted but not just limited to this list:
- Audiology Services – Auditbase,
- Pathology IT – ICE
- Pharmacy IT – Chemocare, PowerGate
- Catering Services – MenuMark
- Messaging interfacing between Rhapsody and Abbot, Auditbase, ICE, PACS, New Baby Registrations (Alphalake), Sentinel and Viewpoint
The Informatics team are currently working on this and would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused. The team will continue to provide updates on progress and resolution steps. All affected areas will need to revert to using their location business continuity plans.
Should you have any further queries then please contact your line manager in the first instance or the IT Service desk on ext. 4050 or by contacting the Chat with the IT Service Desk.
ESR downtime
Users are advised that the ESR Production Service will be withdrawn at 6pm on Friday 27 October 2023 , to carry out essential ESR production maintenance.
The overall period of downtime is estimated to be 18 hours and the Service is expected to become available by 12pm on Saturday 28 October 2023.
Please note the closure time of the online service, your co-operation is requested to ensure that all users are logged off by 6pm on Friday.
ESR, e-Learning, ESRBI, ESR Data Warehouse, ESR Portal and TRS will be unavailable during this period of downtime.
The TRS, ESS over the internet and ESR Portal services will display maintenance pages.
The NHS ESR Hub will be unavailable for a period of approximately 5 hours from 6pm to 11pm on Friday 27 October .
Please ensure you log in and approve any pending notifications prior to the close on Friday.
Unity clinical systems and processes affected by clock change: 29 October, 12.45am BST to 1.30am GMT
Clocks are set to go back this month on Sunday 29 October, please be assured Unity will remain fully available. However, because all of our systems are not yet aligned we are asking you to take note of the following:
For up to 75 minutes:
- New patients will not be able to be registered on iPM (Lorenzo) and FirstNet – full BCP required.
- Medisoft will not show new patients – full BCP required.
- Radiology/pathology orders placed in Unity will be queued and not delivered until 1am GMT. – BCP required.
- New results will not be visible in Unity during this time but will be sent once the systems come back up.
- Inpatients admitted from ED will not show up in iPM until the systems are back up.
- Inpatients transferred between wards will show on Capman but not on iPM until the systems are back up.
- Inpatients discharged during this time will not show as discharged in iPM until the systems are back up.
- Any new baby registrations will not be able to be completed until the systems are back up.
Colleagues will need to ensure they revert to BCPs for Blood Tests and Imaging requests during this time. The lab will phone out any urgent or abnormal results to the requestor during this time. Other Unity functionality such as documentation and Meds Admin will not be affected by this activity. Desktop alerts will be issued from 6pm on Saturday evening reminding colleagues about the planned downtime.
Please also be aware that colleagues may also see the following message if a clinical action was scheduled to take place between 1am to 1:59am on Sunday 29 October, you may see the following message, highlighting an inconsistency in times.
Ambiguous time message
This dialog could appear for some users after the time change occurs. Please note this is not an error and perfectly normal.
If a clinical action is scheduled to occur during the duplicate hour (from 1am to 1.59am) a user could potentially get this popup.
Select “Daylight” if the action is to take place in the FIRST 1.00 to 1.59 hour
Select “Standard” if the action is to take place in the SECOND 1.00 to 1.59 hour
Please be assured the activity will be closely monitored at all times.
Should you have any further queries then please contact your line manager in the first instance or the IT Service desk on ext. 4050 or by contacting the Chat with the IT Service Desk.
GGI Focus Group – Survey
The Good Governance Institute have been commissioned by the Trust to undertake some board development for the organisation. The team working with us have interviewed all board members, system partners and now want to get the view of staff working in the organisation. We would be grateful if you could use the below short survey to share your views on the organisation with GGI. The survey is confidential, and the responses go directly to GGI.
When the team working with us feedback the information they will be doing so anonymously and just highlighting themes, so we hope you feel able to respond.
We would be grateful if you could complete your response by Friday 27 October 2023.
Change to calcium requesting in Unity
Clinical colleagues should be aware that “calcium level, blood” is now only requestable in Unity through “bone profile, blood”, which includes serum calcium, albumin, adjusted calcium and alkaline phosphatase. “Calcium” has been included in the searchable synonyms for bone profile to make this more obvious to users.
For more information please email rwh-tr.clinicalchemistryhelpdesk@nhs.net.
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