Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 21 May
May 21, 2021
With all our teams at SWB looking at recovery plans for their service areas, recovery plans for their staff and adjusting to new ways of working in a world of both living with COVID and planning for the radical future of our new hospital, it is an ideal time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t and what needs to continue in your practice. But equally look at what other organisations are doing and look out for new evidence to support your clinical and management decision making process. It is not enough to have the right teams in right place to deliver high quality patient care. It is essential that they use the right knowledge and evidence at the right time to deliver radical changes and genuine quality improvements within our services – both in the acute and community. Evidence based management needs to combine with evidence based medicine.
The library and information specialists based at Sandwell and City libraries will help ‘heavy lifting’ the evidence for you to put in practice and save your time. In talking to their leader, Preeti Puligari, I have learned that the team is engaged in a Health Education England funded, NHS-wide shared repository project by collaborating across the Black Country Trusts. The aim is to deliver an online platform that our staff can access staff publications, patient information leaflets, quality improvement projects, lessons learnt from incidents, guidelines, research trials and more. This is taking place across 6 pilot sites in England and the Black Country & West Birmingham system is one of them. This is a wonderful opportunity for our staff to share our knowledge, our adoption of best practice, spread learning and learn from each other. Only by moving from pockets of innovation to system-wide improvement will the NHS deliver the changes that are needed to sustain and improve care at a time of unprecedented financial and service pressures.
Do get in touch with the library team at swbh.library@nhs.net or ext. 3587 to not only learn about the new resources that have been bought to help you make informed decisions but also the support they can provide you and your team to drive improvements and innovation within our organisation. The resource is there to use and its for anyone who wants to deliver their own evidence based improvements.
Congratulations to our Star of the Week, Wilhemina Goodwin, Nurse Associate who has been commended by her colleagues for the way she has continued to develop and progress beyond expectations. Wilhemina has been praised for her work with the multi-disciplinary team, her professionalism and her work ethics. Thank you, Wilhemina, and well done.
This week we celebrated Clinical Trials Day and it is great to see how the Trust’s research and development team have continued to promote research opportunities to colleagues and patients. Research remains at the core of the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and I am proud of the part that this Trust has played in the COVID-19 trials in order to find the best treatments and protection.
And, we continue with celebrations to recognise different professional groups within the Trust with Friday 14 May being the national day to recognise operating department practitioners (ODPs). During the past year the work of our ODPs has been exemplary and they are vital as we aim to reduce the backlog of elective surgery cases. Thank you for being a valued part of our SWB family.