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Monthly archives: December 2023

Mental Health & Wellbeing Support for Black Country Staff via Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin Staff Wellbeing Hub

 

The Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin Staff Wellbeing Hub offers a confidential mental health and emotional wellbeing support service to NHS and Social Care staff. The Hub (based in Shrewsbury, Shropshire) has recently been commissioned to offer a service to staff in the Black Country ICS system; with current funding available until March 2024.

The Hub offers a person-centred telephone assessment, followed either by brief therapeutic intervention (delivered via MS Teams) or signposting to an appropriate service. The team includes a High Intensity CBT Therapist, Occupational Therapist, Counsellor, Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners and Assistant Psychologists; all of whom offer a range of therapeutic approaches tailored to individual need.

Common referral themes include bereavement, anxiety, depression, workplace stress, workplace bullying, cost of living effects, relationship issues, sexual abuse/assault, emotional abuse, and trauma.

You can refer yourself to receive support for any difficulties you are experiencing in the following ways:

This is a fully confidential service, so the Hub does not reach out to your employer or GP as standard without consent. The only time it will break any confidentiality is if it is felt that you or someone else is at harm, and the Hub will always try to discuss this with you at the time.

In addition to therapeutic support, the Hub also offers webinars on a range of topics which are open to all staff, whether referred to the service or not – if you would be interested in finding out more about these then please get in touch with the team via email or telephone to ask to be placed the Hub’s mailing list.

You can find further information about the Hub at Psychological Wellbeing Hub (Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin) : (mpft.nhs.uk)

Still time to claim your festive reward!

 

Colleagues who were employed before Monday 4 December 2023 were issued with a £10 shopping voucher to be redeemed via the SWB Benefits portal. This was a small token to thank you for all you do for each other and our patients.

If you haven’t claimed your reward yet, please take a few minutes to log into your SWB Benefits account and redeem it.

There are over 90 retailers to choose from!  You could put it towards your weekly food shop (e.g. Tesco, Aldi, Morrisons and more!), use it with one of the major online retailers such as Amazon, treat yourself to a new item of clothing (e.g. ASOS, Primark, TK Maxx, Sports Direct), eat in/out (e.g. Just Eat, Deliveroo, Costa, Turtle Bay, Ember Inns), or buy something for your house (e.g. B&Q, Ikea, Currys PC World). The choice is yours!

Note: The voucher will expire on Wednesday 5 June. Find out more by clicking here.

Register and login to the benefits platform by going to https://swbhbenefits.co.uk/

Struggling to find your employee number upon making your account? Your employee number is at the bottom of the tax sections of your payslip. It’s usually the same as the assignment number, but if people have more than one assignment (i.e. they may have a second job or a bank assignment) that number with have a “-1” or “-2” after it.

For any further queries, please see the FAQs document. If you need assistance in creating a SWB Benefits account or accessing your gift please call our benefits partner on 0800 542 5930. If you need to use a Trust computer to access your gift, please speak to your manager.

Midland Met lunch and learn recap – December 2023

 

Did you miss our latest lunch and learn session? Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered if so!

Just because you couldn’t join us on the day, doesn’t mean you can’t get to grips with the topics we covered. Lunch and Learn sessions are a fantastic way to learn about work taking place across SWB as we get ready to move into Midland Met. These sessions let colleagues discover more about a topic or area as we get ready to open our doors in 2024.

Everyone is encouraged to attend regardless of their role or department. If you have a question you’d like to ask, you can do so on the day, or you can submit it in advance via    swbh.mmuh@nhs.net.

Dates for 2024 sessions will be available shortly. 

You can check out the slides here and be sure to watch the session to stay in the loop.

[embed]https://youtu.be/J-mb9qw0IXw[/embed]

 

Join us to lunch and learn about Midland Met- Today at 12pm

 

A series of lunch and learn sessions focusing on key aspects of the Midland Met programme are coming up. The sessions will take place online and in person, so you can learn more about the work taking place as we get ready to open our new hospital.

These sessions will focus on a particular topic and provide you with the latest information as well as allowing you to ask any questions. This is a great opportunity to connect with colleagues and learn more about Midland Met in an informal setting over your lunch break. And, yes, you are welcome to enjoy your lunch while the sessions takes place.

Everyone is encouraged to attend regardless of their role or department. If you have a question you’d like to ask, you can do so on the day, or you can submit it in advance via swbh.mmuh@nhs.net.

Dates for your diary:

Urgent Treatment Centres to extend opening hours to midnight

 

Our urgent treatment centres at both our Sandwell and City sites will be extending their opening hours from Tuesday 5 December. This means, both Urgent Treatment Centres will be open from 9am – midnight.

Note: Though we have initially planned to extend the opening hours until March 2024, depending on demand this date may change.

The urgent treatment offers GP-led services, but not emergency care, for ailments such as, abdominal pain and minor illnesses, seven days a week.

Are you aware of the new form of documentation of opioid substitution treatment?

 

As you may be aware, there is now a new form for documentation of opioid substitution treatment information so that it is accessible for all clinical colleagues to access. This has been approved by the change panel, clinical ward services pharmacy team as well as the toxicology team.

Please see OST form template for preview of how it will look in Unity.

IT migration scheduled for 4 December has been deferred

 

The IT migration works scheduled for Monday 4 December has been deferred.  Informatics are working closely with our support vendors BT and AWS to resolve this situation and the activity will be rescheduled in due course.

All affected services will now be fully available as normal on Monday 4 December, 10pm.

We apologies for any inconvenience caused.

 

Maintenance affecting One Health and Care Shared Care record: 6 December, 8am – 4pm

 

Colleagues are advised there is essential third-party maintenance taking place on Wednesday 6 December from 8am – 4pm affecting the One Health and Care Shared Care record.

This work is scheduled to begin at 8am and should be completed by 4pm on Wednesday 6 December.

During this time the One Health and Care Shared record link which is accessed via UNITY and SystmOne will be unavailable from 8am and will not return any patient data for up to eight hours.

Unity and SystmOne are not affected by this upgrade and will remain fully operational. The Longitudinal Record View, HIE, will also remain fully operational during this time to access patient GP records .

Should you have any further queries then please contact the IT service desk on ext. 4050 or by contact chat with the IT service desk.

 

Christmas Fayre- Saturday 2 December 2023

 

There is a Christmas Fayre that will be taking place tomorrow at the nursery at Sandwell General Hospital from 10am – 1pm.

This event will have a grotto where you can meet Father Christmas, cafe, face painting, henna tattoos, craft stall and Christmas crafts activities all staff are welcomed to this event.

For more information contact emma.collier@nhs.net.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 1 December

 

As many of you will be aware, the NHS Act of 2022 mandated NHS Trusts to collaborate with other Trusts to ensure that benefits for patients were maximised in the future. Our Trust is part of the Black Country Provider Collaborative (BCPS), in which we work in partnership with The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, on matters in which patients and or colleagues will benefit and where we think that working together will ensure that we are greater than the sum of our parts.  Our Trust Chair, Sir David Nicholson, also chairs the collaborative.

Since 2021, the BCPC has developed a programme of clinical collaboration between specialities, as well as corporate collaboration in areas such as payroll, procurement, and human resources. The purpose of this work is to collaboratively tackle things like:

  1.  Clinical service resilience issues – workforce resilience or lack of clinical critical mass
  2. Efficiency/productivity best practice sharing on matters like Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) or on corporate support services
  3. Delivery of elective/waiting time recovery through mutual aid
  4. Workforce planning collaboration – recruitment, bank/agency protocols etc
  5. Financial recovery delivery as a system

To help us to manage this work more effectively, the BCPC has asked for expressions of interest from executive directors across the four organisations, to become the lead subject matter experts for their respective fields and to help Trusts coordinate work between them.

I am delighted that we have three of our SWB executive directors who have been asked and agreed to take on these wider leadership roles within the BCPS. Chief Nursing Officer, Mel Roberts, Chief Governance Officer, Kam Dhami and Chief Finance Officer, Dinah McLannahan will lead the development in their respective roles, nursing/midwifery/AHPs, governance and finance.

It’s really pleasing to see our organisation so well represented at this level and I will of cause bring you regular updates on the progress of the BCPC.

Whilst Kam and Mel will take on these roles as an addition to their substantive position here at SWB, Dinah’s role is slightly different, she will be joining the BCPC on a fulltime basis as a 15-month secondment. This reflects the scale of the financial challenges we currently face as a system and changes to the ways we work across collaboratively that require careful financial planning.

I would like to thank Dinah for her leadership here at SWB over the last six years and wish her every success in this new role. Simon Sheppard, Director of Operational Finance at the Trust, will become our chief finance officer during this time to ensure continuity of service and leadership of finance and planning here at SWB.

Finally, thank you to everyone who have been involved in our Winter Ambition focus week which has been taking place at City Hospital. Our improvement team have been embedded into our emergency department and across our medical wards, looking at areas of good practice that we can share across the organisation and any areas in which they think we could improve our performance, which we know will positively both patients and colleagues. Next week their focus will be on Sandwell Hospital.

Have a good weekend.

Richard.

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