COVID-19 Bulletin: Friday 22 May
May 22, 2020
This is our seven days a week bulletin. Please use this bulletin and cascade arrangements within care and corporate groups to guide your actions. Throughout May we are determined to reduce avoidable harm and death in the people we are taking care of. Kindness remains the guiding principle of all the actions in our work to tackle the virus – kindness in how we look after patients, visitors, and one another.
As advertised in Toby’s message, we continue to listen to ideas and voices from staff from black and minority ethnic backgrounds about what more we can do to tackle elevated risk. Today we held a seminar with 25 senior clinicians drawn from across the Trust to develop ideas, and over the next week we are finalising a revised risk assessment tool which seeks to integrate underlying health status, age, gender and ethnicity. The current expectation is that medium-risk individuals from that new assessment will have a different PPE prescription during June. Across the Trust however, the main focus has to remain for all of us on Handwashing and Social Distancing!
Numbers not statistics: Today’s totals (Yesterday’s totals)
| Number of our patients confirmed with COVID-19 during the pandemic | Number of positive COVID-19 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 |
| 1229
(1223) |
796
(795) |
344
(341) |
124
(124) |
89
(87) |
611
(537) |
1. Fit testing clinics are running this weekend and Bank Holiday
We have been advised that delivery of Alpha 3030V masks will be delayed until mid-June, and while we await delivery of both them and Alpha S 3V masks, we urge colleagues to get fit tested on a 3M 1873 or 3M 1863 FFP3 mask, as there is plenty of fit testing capacity and we have over 29,000 of these masks in stock. Fit testing clinics are running over the bank holiday weekend from 8am to 8pm at the outpatients clinic on first floor at Sandwell and on the first floor near the rehab gym at the front of City. Please book your appointment on 5050, or if you’re not able to do that, pop up to the clinics at a time to suit you and see if they can fit you in.
2. Guidance on cleaning bed spaces
Colleagues are reminded that it is vitally important that once patients are discharged the bed space is thoroughly cleaned. To help you we have produced the following poster which demonstrates the correct procedure for effective cleaning. You can view it here:
3. Birmingham Treatment Centre now open with clear processes for access and care of patients
As you know the Treatment Centre (BTC) is back up and running, providing day case surgery and some clinical appointments for patients in a safe and controlled environment. Please look at the processes we have designed to ensure the continued safety of colleagues and patients as we move forward with our recovery. The separate entrance and lay-out will help provide reassurance that services are separated from acute COVID-19 care with new markings on the floor to support social distancing, perspex screens to protect staff, new handwashing zones and new flooring. You can view both diagrams on Connect by clicking on process for patient arrival and clinic room process.
4. Evidence Updates and Research portfolio for COVID-19
A lot of information and research is being published on COVID-19. To make it easier to digest information on this rapidly changing situation, SWB Library and Knowledge Services are producing daily updates that highlight the latest evidence from NICE Rapid Reviews, guidelines from Royal Colleges and professional bodies, SWB Trials update, WHO situation reports, rapid evidence summaries from Oxford CEBM, education/training resources for all healthcare staff and healthcare technology news.
The Library page on Connect has a new section on COVID-19 evidence updates. Rapid evidence summaries by the SWB Therapeutic team to support Clinical Advisory Group are also included as part of these updates. Library services are keen to help with any literature search requests you might have that are related to COVID-19. Please email your topic request to swbh.library@nhs.net
COVID-19 Research Pass (CRP) program is now available for all SWB clinical staff who are studying or writing about COVID-19.This programme will give you access to over 26 million full text articles. You can apply for the pass at https://covid19.readcube.com.
5. Property store opening times
The property room is available for the storage of deceased patient’s property until their families are able to come to site to collect it following the easing of lockdown restrictions.
The store at Sandwell is the Berridge room in the courtyard next to occupational health while at City it is the Anne Gibson rooms. The new opening time for the receipt of the property is 11am to 1pm. Monday to Friday. (Bank holiday Monday excluded).