COVID-19 Bulletin: Friday 17 April
April 17, 2020
This is our once a night bulletin. Please use this bulletin and daily cascade arrangements within care and corporate groups to guide local action. Remember KINDNESS is our watchword in implementing our plans. It is also our way of keeping in touch with shielders, home workers, part-timers and volunteers. You are on the team. Thank you!
On March 14th we revised our visitor guidance. This prevented all face to face visiting to our wards and departments, like A&E, other than in certain exceptional circumstances (end of life care, birth partners, and lack of capacity). We have issued specific End of Life Care guidance limiting access to two family members. This guidance remains the Trust’s policy.
Each ward has specific technology in place to support video-enabled contact with relatives and we positively encourage that access to tackle isolation and anxiety.
Numbers not statistics: An everyday feature of our bulletin (yesterday’s data..)
| Number of our patients confirmed with COVID-19 during the Pandemic | Number of positive COVID-19 positive patients who have been discharged during the Pandemic | Number of patients who have died in our hospitals who tested positive for COVID-19 during the Pandemic | Number of patients entered by the Trust into a COVID-19 research trial to date | Number of COVID-19 positive patients who are inpatients with us today | Number of our staff absent due to ill-health or isolation today |
| 801 (780) | 419 (399) | 231(224) | 48 (43) | 151 (157) | 715 (744) |
- Easy to read PPE guidance issued
Tomorrow the Trust will again see new posters plastered making sure we understand what PPE to wear, where and when. Importantly, staff on the same ward may be wearing different PPE and that is ok.
The guidance clarifies existing practice based on questions asked by staff over the last fortnight. Remember we can get you the PPE you need. Please speak up if you are missing out.
The guidance is listed below and applies now
- Recommended PPE for Primary Care, Outpatients and Community Teams
- Recommended PPE for acute clinical settings
2. Could you be a Mental Health First Aider?
The Trust already has some mental health first aiders, as well as wider psychological support offer in place associated with the Pandemic. As advertised last week we now want to scale up that support in each frontline department, and to provide key staff with specific TRiM training to tackle issues like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which are predicted to arise in coming weeks and months. A training package has been purchased and is now in place.
We are looking for volunteers to be considered for this role. The advert can be accessed by clicking here. Training will start in coming days, with more intensive training for the TRiM work taking place in May.
You will know who your local mental health first aider is – because soon their photographs will be on the wall where you work. It is ok to talk about mental wellbeing.
3. Food is for everyone!!!
We are all touched by the generosity of local people, charities, trade unions, schools, and businesses offering donations of equipment, face and hand creams, and food as we work. You are kindly reminded that such donations are for everyone. Trust volunteers, ward service officers, ward clerks, therapists, doctors and nurses… nothing given to us is ever ‘just for..’. Likewise our donations are being actively spread across our primary care, community location, hospital and other settings.
Meanwhile, consistent with our values and approach, we are working to ensure that where appropriate such donations reach communities-in-need locally. If you need advice on how to support this work at a time of wage loss, spikes in universal credit, and unemployment, please contact the Trust comms or Your Trust Charity team.
4. Rainbow brigades go live in the sunshine
Lots of staff from across the Trust have now volunteered to take part in temporary redeployment into key support functions. Others’ roles mean that they have time to take up these opportunities too. Today our induction process started for two of the five teams:
YELLOW PPE WARDENS: Key roles making sure not only that everyone has what they need, but uses it right. Thank you to everyone on the team. Your High Vis is coming….
GREEN CLEANING SQUADS: Supporting our amazing Ward Service Officers by providing additional touch-point cleaning time to ensure that door handles, communal areas, and others parts of all our sites are cleaner than ever.
More detail follows next week on red and purple teams, which will include colleagues shielding and working from home. Remember if you are either shielding or working from you must be registered on the Trust’s database. Failure to register by April 21st will be regarded as absence without leave unless you are formally isolating or otherwise off sick.
Click here for latest brigade guidance.
5. Managing anxiety – everyone’s responsibility
From the start of the pandemic we have all emphasised to one another the need to manage our own, our patients’ and our families’ concerns. This last week has seen elevated national concern about the disproportionate number of BAME key workers who have died with Covid-19, and – as we discussed in QIHD yesterday – national and local data about critical care and hospital deaths which also showed some difference by age, gender, co-morbidity and ethnic background. Within the local Black-British community in western Birmingham some specific concerns have been raised, linked in part to some accusations made on social media which are, quite simply, wrong. A formal statement responding to these falsehoods is on the Trust website. The Trust is working with individual families, local community leaders, universities and the local authority to ensure that we separate facts from myths and address concerns as they arise.
It is worth remembering that what we say as individuals can help or hinder understanding by a patient, family or wider community. In particular we need to remember how very many people have been discharged safe and well from our red-stream care, and the truth that blue-stream patients remain query Covid-19 patients – as all of us should behave as if we are spreaders of this virus.
Dr Sarb Clare, who leads our acute medical teams at City Hospital, has made a short film reminding all of us, and our loved ones’, of the process of Covid-19 assessment that we undertake.