Heartbeat: Listening into action – going for good

August 15, 2018

L-R: Group Director, Chetan Varma; Director of Operations, Michelle Harris; Group Director of Nursing, Claire Hubbard; Deputy Directorate General Manager Admitted Care, Craig Simpson and Chief Executive, Toby Lewis

We hosted our July listening into action (LiA) event in the education centre at Sandwell Hospital, where the focus was on the basics of good care being consistently delivered across the Trust.

The event saw over 150 clinical colleagues of all grades from medicine and emergency care and primary care communities and therapies, come together to discuss methods of how we can continue deliver consistent care as well as areas for further improvement.

Group Director of Nursing Medicine and Emergency Care, Claire Hubbard opened proceedings with a look at what we had achieved so far as an organisation following on from Care Quality Commission (CQC) findings. This included aspects rated as good, those which required improvement and those deemed inadequate.

Claire said: “Following on from recent CQC inspections, there were a variety of findings.

“Our community inpatients and medical care at Sandwell Hospital were rated as good. The CQC noted that inpatient services were clean and well maintained and there was sufficient evidence of multidisciplinary team working across therapies, nursing and medicine and good integration of care for patients at both services.

“Our medical care at City requires some improvements with some inconsistencies in the application of the mental capacity act when people were unable to make some decisions for themselves and slight delays occurring at some stages of the patient journey from admission to discharge.

“Our community adult inpatient care at Rowley Regis Hospital was rated (in parts) as inadequate with medicine management being of concern due and the high number of agency workers.”

Claire was followed by Directorate General Manager – Admitted Care, Craig Simpson who facilitated a group activity which asked colleagues in the room to think about what potentially disrupts them, gets in their way and ultimately hinders them from doing their job effectively.

Craig fed back: “We are continuing to address our ongoing IT issues, improve care documentation, ensure professions work together better in teams and have a higher capacity of social worker support.

“Whilst we’re improving in these areas, it’s clear that more work needs to be done to fully rectify these issues.”

The LiA concluded with a session led by Group Director of Medicine and Emergency Care, Chetan Varma and Group Director of Operations, Medicine and EC, Michelle Harris which looked at how patient flow could be improved.

Chetan said: “The consultant of the week and push/pull initiatives were introduced to improve senior clinical management decision making for patients, including timely discharge.

“We had mixed responses from attendees with some saying these methods worked better for them and were simple to implement, whilst the experience of others differed. It was good to get some feedback as to how people on the frontline feel these projects are working and get some ideas on how they could be improved which will help our overall goal of improving patient flow throughout the organisation.”