Monthly archives: January 2024

Type 2 Diabetes and Young Programme (T2Day)

Healthier Futures Black Country Integrated Care Systems are hosting a Type 2 Diabetes and Young Programme webinar on Thursday 25 January and Tuesday 13 February from 2pm – 3pm.

The Session will include:

• An overview of T2DaY
• Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria.
• How to refer and where to refer.
• How to claim payment for the consultation.

Join to learn all about the T2DAY Programme and find out how you can help your young service users tackle Type 2 Diabetes.

To sign up please click here or scan the QR code below.

Black Country Diabetes Education and Training Day

Healthier Futures Black Country Integrated Care Systems are hosting a Diabetes Education and Training Day on Thursday 29 February from 9am – 5pm at Portway Lifestyle Centre, Newbury Lane, Oldbury, B69 1HE.

Sessons include:
• The overall care of people living with type 2 diabetes.
• Cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic systems.
• Pharmaceutical and holistic management to achieve better health outcomes.

With a combination of expert speakers from across our healthcare system and stands with service providers, this exciting day will provide practical tools and actions for practices to implement within primary care.

To sign up please click here or scan the QR code below.

Where is Crackle?

Lucy Keates and Ronseal are on the lookout for Crackle the Paro Seal. Efforts are being made to re-introduce these incredible, friendly, innovative and interactive medical devices. Paro Seals are utilised under staff supervision to bring comfort and de-escalate stress, experienced by our inpatients, for example living with dementia or a learning disability.

You may well remember the original launch of the four Paro seals, whereby a competition was held to name them. Sadly Ronseal, Snap and Pop are missing their mate Crackle. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, they were not utilised. Lucy has been out in her boat all over the high sea’s of SWBH and found three of the four. Help Lucy and Ronseal bring Crackle back into operation with his ship mates.

The seals need servicing before their relaunch and we appeal to you all, no matter your department or directorate, the SWBH Team.

If you find Crackle, please contact lucy.keates2@nhs.net.

Upgrade affecting the blood gas analysers: 17 January, 9am – 5pm

Please be aware an essential pathology IT software upgrade will be taking place on Wednesday 17 January affecting the blood gas analysers and liat analysers. The work is being carried out by our support partner Black Country Pathology Services and is scheduled to begin at 9am for approximately eight hours and should be completed at 5pm.

During this time Unity will continue to function as normal.

The blood gas analysers and liat analysers can work independently during the upgrade; however, from 10am to 10.30am no results will be forwarded to Unity.  As these are point of care tests clinical staff will have had sight of the result on the point of care device at the time of analysis on the printout. We would recommend that clinical staff make a separate note of the blood gas and liat results section within the documents section of the patient record.

Whilst it’s possible to add these results manually via assessments and fluid balance/adult quick view/blood gas analysis, we recommend not to do this as it will create duplicate records when the data flows back after the upgrade is complete.

After the upgrade the results carried out during this time should transfer automatically to Unity.

The activity will be closely monitored by our support partner, point of care leads and IT support teams.

As always, should you have any further queries then please do contact the point of care team on ext. 5352.

Dry January cake and samosa sale at Sandwell: 17 January

Our alcohol care team will be hosting a cake and samosa sale outside the lifts at Sandwell by Lyndon Ground on Wednesday 17 January, 1pm – 3pm. The team will also be on hand to talk about everything Dry January. The funds raised will go towards the wellbeing of our patients and help purchase goods such as pamper packs and food vouchers.

For more information please email amy.thompson18@nhs.net.

Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 12 January

As we look to our future, beyond the opening of MMUH, we start to set the foundations for our next significant development opportunity, as a Trust and System Partner, to sustainably improve the care we provide to our people, patients, and population.

Our current poor staff survey response rates, the findings of our Fundamentals Of Care programme and our extremely challenging financial position highlight the amount of work we need to do, together, to achieve the standards we aspire to.

In 2023 the Trust’s 2022-27 strategy identified continuous quality improvement as an enabler to the delivery of our vision and objectives. This was because we recognised, by researching very successful healthcare organisations, that by creating the right conditions for continuous improvement we would be able to respond more effectively to today’s challenges, deliver better care for patients and give better outcomes for communities. We learnt that continuous improvement is the single biggest staff empowerment and quality improvement vehicle we could deploy.  We also decided that carrying on as we were, would not change things sufficiently.  In other words, if you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always got.

In 2023 NHS England launched NHS IMPACT (Improving Patient Care Together), which is a guidance for all NHS Organisations to follow, to encourage the implementation of a continuous improvement approach. This was assuring as it confirmed to us that our commitment to continuous improvement was the right approach for us to take.

So, what is continuous improvement and what will it looks like at SWBH? Put simply, it’s an approach, from floor to Board which will empower and upskill all our staff, executives included, to not only come to work to do their work but to come to work to improve their work every day. It will result in us all working together on fewer priorities, but to a greater depth to make more significant improvements to our measures of success. It is not another improvement initiative that will come and go. It is not a programme to teach improvement tools and run a number of improvement projects. It will become “the way we will do things round here.” This will take time and commitment from us all. As a Board and as an executive team, I can assure you we are committed to this for the long term.

I am pleased to update you that we have now moved another step closer to our ambition to launch and embed our own SWB approach to continuous improvement. We have begun our work with our expert external partner who will teach us how to become a continuous improvement organisation over the next two years. We will then be sufficiently skilled and prepared to continue the journey on our own. The first step has been a readiness assessment by the executive team to enable us to hold a mirror up to how we function as an organisation at present, so that we can start to plan our approach to improving that. We have also begun to define what the areas of focus will be for improvement for 2024/25. These will be shared with you as part our 24/25 annual plan.

Over the next 6-9 months, as we are preparing and moving in to MMUH, work will be going on in the background to launch our continuous improvement approach post MMUH move. During this time, you will have the opportunity to learn more about continuous improvement as part of the ARC leadership training programme (module three).

If you would like to learn more about NHS IMPACT in the meantime, you can join the NHS IMPACT Sharing Event on 1 February at 9:30am – 11am. This virtual event is for anyone who’s curious about improvement and is open to all NHS staff, regardless of your role.

Register for the sharing event here.

Another important way that we can see how things are with in the organisation, is via the results of the staff survey. You will know that I was disappointed in the response rate to the annual survey which took place during October/November – so I am really pleased to see that we have already improved on the responses to the quarterly Pulse survey, which is currently open and will close on 31 January. The higher the response rate, the more reliable the data that we get and the better informed we can be to make improvements.

If you have not yet taken the survey, please do take five minutes (I promise it won’t take longer) to have your say: Questionnaire Portal (quality-health.co.uk)

Have a good week.

Richard.

Maintenance affecting Wi-Fi: Thursday 25 January, 11pm – 1am

Please be aware essential IT maintenance to the Trust’s Wi-Fi controllers is taking place from Thursday 25 January from 11pm overnight to Friday 26 January at 1am to help improve network stability.  This will take around two hours and will affect all wards and departments across the Trust.

During this time, any colleagues that access computers/devices via a LAN network cable, utilise a Trust mobile device via SWBHI Wi-Fi, and the Bleeps application should be unaffected.

For approximately 10 minutes at 11.15pm SWBH Wi-Fi will go off- line resulting in a brief loss of Internet connectivity, Unity and access of shared drives over Wi-Fi at all Trust locations which will affect WOWs, laptops and desktops.

• If able to do so, please use an alternative device that connects via a LAN network ethernet cable.
• We would recommend that colleagues save any work prior.
• If you are required to record clinical care during this short outage, please try again once the Wifi is back (up to 10 minutes after the outage begins). If there is an urgent and pressing need to record care during these 10 minutes, please locate a device that is connected to the network with a LAN ethernet cable (such as a desktop PC) to make the record. If necessary contact the duty manager via (City bleep 5401 and Sandwell bleep 6216) for further guidance.
• Colleagues who are emergency Bleep app users should not be affected; however, in the issues please revert to BCP and utilise a radio where possible.

Please be assured the security team will ensure radios are available for collection for our EMRT, duty managers and outreach teams if required. These must be returned straight afterwards.

Do you know about the new hyperkalaemia guideline?

The new Trust guidelines on management of hyperkalaemia are now available. The guidelines for adult inpatients incorporate the Nice accredited Renal Association guidelines 2020 and major changes include:

• Changes to calcium gluconate dosing.
• New measures to avoid hypoglycaemia with insulin-dextrose.
• Use of sodium zirconium cyclosilicate (Lokelma) to remove potassium from the body.
• Closer monitoring of potassium and glucose following treatment.

For further details please see hyperkalaemia in adults guideline.

Short dial service withdrawn from mobile devices – please use full number

Due to a service change by BT the short dial (where you can dial an extension number only) process on mobile devices has been withdrawn. You can still contact Trust extension numbers by direct dialling with the prefix of 0121 507 XXXX.

Note: If you require IVOR the sequence would be 0121 507 4000.  

Work experience offer go live in February

The Trust’s work experience offer is going live from Monday 5 February and the Apprenticeship team are looking to offer more administrative/reception type placements to any interested local young people.

Our offer is for June and July 2024.

If you feel your department/team could offer a placement (one day up to one week), please get in touch with Nicola.smith16@nhs.net who can provide more information.

All offers must be made by Wednesday 31 January, 5pm.