Monthly archives: November 2023

Your Right to be Heard

Every month in staff magazine Heartbeat, we publish letters from colleagues and responses from a member of the relevant department or team.

Do you have something you’d like to say, or a question you’d like answered? Tell us! We will look to get a response to your issue or query from a relevant colleague.

Visit www.surveymonkey.com/r/yourrighttobeheard, scan the QR code, or write an email of no more than 200 words and send it to swbh.comms@nhs.net. Please note all submissions via the Survey Monkey will be anonymous.

Drug safety notice: Co-trimoxazole 40mg/200mg/5ml

Co-trimoxazole 40mg/200mg/5m sugar free oral suspension will be out of stock until early February 2024.

With this in mind clinical colleagues should consider prescribing co-trimoxazole 80mg/400mg/5ml oral suspension.

Please see Co-trimoxazole information sheet for further details.

For more information please contact the pharmacy department on ext. 5263/3783.

Menopause Champion

What is a menopause champion?

If you, or someone you support, is struggling with menopause symptoms and you need someone to talk to about what you are experiencing, you could contact one of our trained Menopause Champions.

Menopause Champions are motivated and enthusiastic about supporting others with menopause. They understand the menopause and can openly discuss its impact on those it affects. They are there to lend a listening ear, provide support and signpost you to where you might find further help. They are not able to provide any medical advice.

If you would like to talk to a menopause champion, you could visit one of our Menopause Cafes (advertised in the Comms Bulletins) or email one of our champions. Please give your name and contact details so they can get back to you.

SWB menopause champions:

Can you support medical infusion with donations?

To celebrate Christmas, our medical infusion suite are planning on building a donation tree. The tree will be built of tins and dried foods, toiletries and anything that is not perishable. At the end of Christmas, the team will be donating the contents to charity.

If you would like to donate any goods, please email shehnaz.mohammed@nhs.net. Alternatively, you can call either 0121 507 5289 or 0781 277 0913 to arrange donations.

Winter Ambition continues at SWB

After weeks of sustained pressure, particularly on our emergency departments, resulting in a critical incident, Winter Ambition has been introduced with the aim to make things better for you and better for our patients.

We started our two weeks of action at City. Key milestones we have reached as a result of Winter Ambition so far include:

• Our PPCT bed allocation has been having a trial run at being managed by our integrated discharge hub which has resulted in getting patients in the right place sooner.
• Completion of admission checklists when patients first arrive on wards at City which has meant the integrated discharge hub have been able to complete social care planning when patients arrive rather than as they are leaving.
• More TTO (your to take out) medication have been coming through pharmacy meaning medications can be prioritised and patients discharged earlier.
• Next week will focus on our Sandwell site whilst trying to maintain the great work at City from this week.

It’s not just about having these weeks and then going back to our usual ways of working – it’s about taking learning and implementing it into our business as usual and we want your feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Please do speak to your leadership teams, or if you prefer to feedback anonymously, you can do so here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Winterambition.

Makaton training available for nurses

A new elearning resource for nurses to develop their understanding of Makaton and learn basic Makaton signs, has been added to the NHS Learning Hub.

The training provides information about the different ways in which people communicate, and how nurses need to consider these different options when caring for people. It also provides key techniques and tips to use as nurses to improve our communication skills, and provides resources that will help us as nurses to learn skills to effectively provide care for people with different communication needs and styles

By the end of the session, learners will know:

• how to better support patients who have communication difficulties
• how Makaton uses speech, signs and symbols as a means of communication and how to apply it in the workplace
• some basic vocabulary to start their Makaton journey
• how to access further information, training and support through the Makaton website

It has been developed by NHS England and The Makaton Charity and is available free of charge for all nursing staff.

For more information, please visit the Makaton Training for Nurses webpage.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 24 November

Today is the last opportunity to complete the staff survey and for you to have your say on what it’s like to work at Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust – it closes this evening at 5pm.

You, our people, are the greatest asset we have, without you, we can’t improve the health outcomes and life chances of our patients and our community and that’s why you are at the heart of our new Trust strategy, patients, people, and population. I am often told, and indeed I feel it myself, that this is one of the friendliest trusts that colleagues have ever worked in, yet we struggle to get a good response rate to the survey. At the point of me writing this message, we are on 27%, that’s only 2,116 of you that have completed it.

Some feedback I have heard is that some colleagues feel that we don’t take the results seriously enough, or that they don’t see any action as a result of it and therefore don’t fill it in. As chief executive of this organisation, the staff survey results are one of the most important documents I receive into my inbox. They are discussed at exec meetings, at Board, at Trust Management Committee – the results do matter. We have already discussed how we can make them more meaningful to you and we have made a commitment to the Board that we will have tangible actions as a result of this year’s feedback – that’s why it’s so important that we hear the views of as many of you as possible.

The bigger the response rate to the survey, means we have a larger statistical view of how you feel and more ideas for improvement are generated, that’s why I am asking you today, if you haven’t already (and that’s a lot of you!) please do spend 10 minutes completing your survey.

I know that things have been tough lately and time might have been hard to come by, however we have QIHD today, and I have asked all managers to pause for 10-15 minutes to allow you the time to complete it.

The survey link is unique to you – you will find it in your e-mails by searching they can search their e-mails for Staff Survey 2023, and it will come from picker_surveys@picker.org.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you all for you hard work over this week and last. Sustained pressure on our emergency departments and patients staying in our acute beds for longer periods of time led us to declare a critical incident. The response from you all was impressive – indeed I think I saw the best of our organisation during last week – but this must become the norm.

Over the next two weeks, you will hear lots of talk about our ‘Winter Ambition’ – this is to make things better for you and better for our patients. It starts with two focus weeks, one at City Hospital (w/c 27 November) and one at Sandwell Hospital (w/c 4 December). These weeks will see teams of colleagues (including myself and the rest of the executive team) having a focus on unblocking and resolving issues ‘in real time’ in order to help us maintain good patient flow throughout the hospital. I must stress however, that it’s not just about having these weeks and then going back to our usual ways of working – it’s about taking learning and implementing it into our business as usual.

Those of you who were keeping an eye on the HSJ Awards last week might have noticed that we had a couple of winners from our area. One of which was Flourish, a project run by one of our two place partnerships – NHS Ladywood and Perry Barr, which is part of the Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Partnership. They scooped the NHS Race Equality Award for their work in reducing inequalities thorough creative school and community-based interventions. Congratulations to everyone involved.

Finally, staying on the subject of integrated working, you may have seen information about new shared care records which are now live, enabling the sharing of health and social care data across the Black Country and West Midlands.

Two regional shared care records are now linked to Unity and SystmOne. These are major sources of clinical data which provide us access to clinical information from health and social care organisations across the Black Country (One Health and Care) and the West Midlands (West Midlands Shared Care Record,which includes UHB).

These two systems are allowing us to share blood results, radiology, allergies, and visit data between us and other organisations across secondary care, primary care, community trusts, WMAS and social care. Further expansion in the future will allow us to share clinical documents.

The aim is to provide the best possible access to high quality data to improve patient outcomes and save staff and clinician time, by:

· Enhancing collaborative working between individuals and organisations

· Providing colleagues the information needed to make faster and more accurate decisions -reducing the need to order repeat tests and / or request records from other organisations

· Reducing the burden on patients to relay key information with each new contact

A lot of work has gone into the getting this system live across SWB and I would like to thank those who have been involved – if we can use this system effectively – our patient flow will be quicker, patient experience will be better and we will be on our way to achieving our winter ambition.

Have a good weekend.

Richard.

Latest edition of Heartbeat now available!

The latest edition of Heartbeat is now available to read! This month, we’re celebrating our stars – our first ARC Star Award recipient Crystal on page three, our Rising Star and Distinguished Service Award winner on pages 16-17, and the five stars awarded to the day nursery on page six, to name but a few!

And talking of stars, Christmas is on the way: you can learn more about celebrating Christmas with the chaplaincy team and our patients on page seven.

We’ve also marked some fantastic achievements seen across the Trust, including the donation of organs to save four lives, thanks to the donors and our theatres team, and the first anniversaries of both the virtual wards team and the cancer hotline.

Did you know former cohort has been upgraded to Cority?

Former cohort has now been upgraded to Cority. If you have an existing account, please use your current username. You will be required to request a new password by email to swbh.ohreferrals@nhs.net.  Please use the following link to login to submit management referrals or to access existing reports – https://swbh.my.cority.com/

Please see useful documents below for further details.

Management Referral – Submitting a Referral using the Validation Process

Reviewing Open Management Referrals – MyCority

Do you know about the changes coming to Safeguard from Friday?

As you may be aware, our incident reporting system Safeguard will be going live this Friday (1 December).

The new national Learn from Patient Safety Events (fFPSE) service is being introduced as a vastly improved central NHS service for the recording and analysis of patient safety events that occur in England.

To support this, colleagues will still log in and report incidents in the same way however the incident reporting form will look different and there will be some new questions. This is to help ensure better quality data to support patient safety improvement. A video on what this means for you and ‘how to’ guides are available on the Safeguard home page when you log in.

Training sessions will also be announced in the coming weeks should staff want support with the new system.

Be sure to also check out this video Introducing the Learn from Patient Safety Events service below:

Click Here For The Poster 

For further information or support please email swb-tr.RiskManagement@nhs.net.