Monthly archives: October 2024
Richard Beeken: Thank you from our Chief Executive
Richard Beeken, Chief Executive has been praising colleagues and commending them for all their hard work which has gone into the big move of patients from our Sandwell site to Midland Met.
Be sure to check out this short video below from Richard thanking SWB colleagues.
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Staff ID badges: Ensure you are scanning your badge correctly
If you are experiencing issues with your ID badge at Midland Met when trying to scan through doors, please ensure that it is not next to another pass, such as your car park pass or smart card as this will result in the badge scanning incorrectly and not working.
Still need to get your new Staff ID badge, click here for details.
Pathology been realigned between sites with the opening of MMUH
Pathology services have been realigned between sites with the opening of MMUH. MMUH now houses an essential services laboratory, with only specialist chemistry remaining at Sandwell.
Samples that will need to transfer between sites are as follows:
- Blood cultures from both City and Sandwell will need to be transferred to MMUH
- Outpatient pathology samples from Sandwell will need to be transferred to MMUH.
To facilitate these changes, the SWBH Logistics Service will collect Pathology samples from the City and Sandwell Health campuses and deliver these to MMUH. They will also deliver Pathology and Phlebotomy consumable supplies for departments in both Sandwell and MMUH.
Which sites does this affect?
This change currently only affects Sandwell Health Campus and MMUH collections. City Hospital will follow in November, when City moves to MMUH, until then these functions will continue to be managed by the Portering Department
When will my samples be collected?
Collections will be seven days a week at both sites
- Monday to Friday collections start at 7.45am and continue hourly until 7.50pm
- Saturday and Sunday collections start at 7.45am and continue hourly until 2.45pm
How will my samples get to the laboratory?
SWB Logistics Operatives will collect samples from departments and SWBH Logistics Transport will deliver samples to the referred site or Essential Services Laboratory at MMUH as required. Royal Wolverhampton Trust transport will then collect the necessary samples from SWBH and deliver to the RWT Hub as needed.
How do I get my consumables order?
Departments should complete the form here on an NHS device.
When will I get my order?
SWB Logistics will deliver the consumables to your department the next day, at MMUH or the next working day at Sandwell.
When do I need to complete my order form?
Orders placed for MMUH before 6pm 7 days a week will be delivered the next day. At Sandwell, orders placed before 6pm Monday – Friday will be delivered the next working day. Orders placed after 6pm will be delivered the day after the following day at MMUH or following working day at Sandwell.
What if I have a problem with my delivery?
Printing to RICOH printers at MMUH
When printing at MMUH please ensure you are selecting the printer named Mono on VMCLP-EQUIAP1.
If this printer does not appear. please call the IT service desk on 0121 507 4050 to get this added.
Note: This is a new printing environment meaning the first time you try to log into the printer you may need to register your smartcard. You will need to log in with your normal IT username and password that you use for your computer. You will only need to do this once.
For further details please see Printing to RICOH printers at MMUH helpsheet.
Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 4 October
Hello, colleagues.
Well – the day has finally arrived. By the time many of you read this message, we will be moving into our new hospital, the Midland Met (MMUH). Patient moves from Sandwell Hospital to MMUH start at 0700 on Sunday. At our peak, we will be safely transferring one patient every two minutes. There will then follow a bedding in period of a few weeks before we move maternity and neonatal services on 6th November and then finally, City Hospital patients on 10th November.
This is a momentous occasion in so many ways. For the NHS nationally, this is significant because this is only the second brand new, complete acute hospital to have opened in the English NHS in the last decade. For the Birmingham and Black Country areas, this is significant because for too long, our communities, many of whom have significant population health challenges, have deserved better services and better hospital estate to care for them when they are ill. For you, our colleagues, and staff, this is momentous either because many of you will have worked at the Sandwell or City Hospitals for decades, or just because the very process of changing your work location and/or your role, will be a life changing event. I do not underestimate the range of emotions that you will be experiencing at the moment, but I do hope that you are all embracing this change and are in overall terms, as excited about it as I am. Some emotional farewells are being made, both to Sandwell itself but also between colleagues, some of whom won’t be working together in our new arrangements and have done so for many years.
The process of getting to this point has not been easy. The delays experienced decades ago in identifying the site and starting to develop the business case for capital investment. The collapse of Carillion, our first building contractor and the subsequent delays experienced in securing the investment to finish the job. The issues Balfour Beatty had in securing materials and contractual labour during COVID and post-Brexit were also a huge challenge. The biggest challenge we have faced, however, has been re-designing our clinical services to ensure we were offering best practice healthcare to our patients – the MMUH Care Model. The effort that literally hundreds of colleagues have put in to changing clinical pathways, avoiding unnecessary attendance and admission, building 7-day Consultant-led services, and working out how existing services can operate in a radically different environment, has been phenomenal. How colleagues have managed their “day to day” clinical or managerial workloads, while working through designing a new future, has been humbling. Thank you to everyone who has contributed.
On the subject of saying thank you, there are hundreds of individuals or teams who deserve recognition and thanks for their efforts to get us to this point. A few that spring to mind for me are: The MMUH programme Team and all those involved in programme management, clinical change and hospital activation; our domestic services and catering teams who have done so much to clean the hospital and ensure we can continue to feed patients and staff seamlessly; our Clinical group and Directorate leaders for all of their work on staffing availability, job planning and rostering for this brave new world; our estates team, EQUANS colleagues and their colleagues from our building contractor, Balfour Beatty; our colleagues from Siemens; all colleagues involved in the complete redesign of our logistics service. These are just a few of the teams that we could not have managed without.
My thoughts are now already turning to the future and how we realise the benefits of our new care model and hospital, so we can, in essence, justify the £750 million of public money which has been spent on it. The Trust will be reviewing and refreshing its strategy for a post-MMUH world, but there are more immediate, less strategic considerations I want all colleagues to think about. Put simply, we simply must not cut and paste our existing processes and approaches, into a new building and expect it to work better. It won’t. We have redesigned our clinical services – now we must make the most of improved acute hospital staffing and care models and the separation of elective care from emergency care to improve the efficiency of our services and of course, the quality and safety of our services. Our performance against important waiting time standards, emergency care access standards, internal quality standards between specialities and our ability to generate more income by getting waiting times down, all need to improve significantly. Our current reasons or excuses for not doing so, will have largely been removed in the next few weeks. Let’s aspire to delivering better healthcare and achieve that ambition.
See you on the other side!
Richard
Midland Met is officially open
At 5.07am we officially opened Midland Metropolitan University Hospital.
At 5.08am the Emergency Department at Sandwell Hospital officially closed to new patients.
This is the start of an incredible journey.
Congratulations and thank you for your hard work.
CQC sign off Midland Met
Earlier this week, we welcomed members of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to Midland Met for a follow-up visit.
We are pleased to confirm that Midland Met has now officially been added to our existing registration as an additional location.
The CQC were impressed with the building and how hard you are all working to get it ready and safe for patients.
Thank you to our teams for their hard work to make this possible ahead of opening on Sunday.
How to use lockers at Midland Met
Watch our Head of Soft Facilities Management, Ian Oliver, demonstrate how to set your passcode to use the new locker system at Midland Met.
Staff parking for Sandwell patient move day – 6 October
Please note that these will be the parking arrangements during our phased moves to Midland Met.
Current barrier cards for City Hospital, Sandwell General Hospital and Rowley Regis Hospital will work at Midland Met with no additional action required.
The current barrier cards are in the process of being extended, so please do not worry if you receive a message on the entry barrier that your barrier card is due to expire – it will be updated automatically.
If colleagues require a car parking permit and do not currently have one, please apply here: Q-Park (swbh.nhs.uk)
Access to Midland Met car parks
- Access to the site for colleagues will be on level 1 of the car park with entrance from London Street. Please do not enter the car park on level 0 as this area is for patients and visitors and colleagues will be asked to turn around and enter via London Street.
- The staff car park will be restricted to clinical staff only on move days and the following day – if you are involved in the move, you should park using the Cranford Street entrance as normal.
- On call, car share and special permit parking is located on level 1. Temporary signage is in place to highlight where this is.
- On call consultants and other colleagues with special permits with a valid windscreen permit are permitted to use these bays, the car sharing bays (on level 1 next to priority parking) may be used as overflow if all other priority bays are occupied. To utilise these bays you must display your valid windscreen permit and, in the case of on call staff, not be attending your normal shift. Parking charge notices will apply for misuse of these spaces.
- If you need to obtain a special window permit, please contact sandwellpermits@q-park.co.uk.
Electric vehicle charging points
- There are 30 electric vehicle charging sockets at Midland Met located on level 0. To register to access these, visit https://www.geniepoint.co.uk/ds.
- Electric vehicle charging points and bays are available on a first come, first served basis. These spaces must only be used for vehicles that are on charge for up to half a day. The charging point parking area must then be vacated (and left empty) to allow the EV charging point to be used by another user. Parking charge notices will apply for misuse of these spaces.
Parking at Sandwell Hospital on move day
- If you are at Sandwell Hospital on move day, please utilise the multi-storey car park or the car park on Hallam Street. The staff parking areas on the main hospital site will be closed off so we have room to park ambulances involved in the move.
How to contact security on Sandwell patient move day – 6 October
On Sunday, 6 October at 5am our Sandwell ED will close. Should you require security assistance at Sandwell after 5am please call extension 2575.
Should you require security assistance at Midland Met from 5am onwards, please call extension 3163.
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