COVID-19 Bulletin: Monday 6 April
April 6, 2020
This is our once a day bulletin. This will take all national and professional guidance and information and tell you which changes we are implementing when and how. Please use this bulletin and daily cascade arrangements within clinical groups to guide local action. Remember KINDNESS is our watchword in implementing our plans.
This weekend we adapted our PPE guidance to widen the number of staff who might use visors/eye wear alongside a fluid resistant surgical face mask in red areas of the Trust. Further specialty specific guidance will follow on Wednesday.
1. Reasonable management instruction?
The Trust is currently engaged in an immense mobilisation of everyone’s effort to deliver the best care that we can under the circumstances to the patients we serve. In that context, individuals are being asked to work in new roles, new patterns of work, new locations, and under different circumstances with altered staffing ratios and other changes in standard practice. We recognise how disconcerting and challenging this is.
We have in place a series of measures designed to ensure that employees are protected from inadvertent harm through unintended coercion in this process. In basic terms there are things that is reasonable for us to ask of individuals and things that it is not reasonable for us to require someone to do. We have a single stage appeal process for any temporary deployment arrangements. The guidance for this is attached. It applies to all professions. Ordinarily leaders and managers will be asking individuals to adapt. On rare occasions this will be an insistence covered under the contractual obligation to follow a reasonable management instruction. It is very much to be hoped that collective flexibility will assist us all.
2. Thank you to our Nightingale volunteers
On Sunday morning we issued a short-notice call for initial volunteers to work as HCAs and nurses in the NEC Nightingale unit in Birmingham. This is the back-up plan to our own Surge Plan. The Nightingale must be ready when we run out of beds as the surge continues. On that basis it is really important for the whole West Midlands. Thank you to all who have come forward. The initial ‘call’ is now closed.
We are assessing what is needed for the field hospital and who can be spared from our work. That may mean that some volunteers are not released, some are, and others are delayed until later in April. We will get everyone who came forward a reply in principle in the next 36 hours. Training for the NEC takes place imminently.
If you have queries about the Nightingale please contact tobylewis@nhs.net
3. This week is “the start of the surge”
180 colleagues are being moved to support the opening of both D16 and Newton 1 as critical care facilities this week. Two-thirds are now fully trained and the rest will be trained in the next 48 hours. Thank you all. This is a daunting and important step to keep patients safe.
Almost 200 other colleagues are being contacted to move their role into one of our community or hospital wards. This phase of our plan is behind schedule and will need to happen at pace in the next 3 days. We have opened almost 150 beds since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and need to work to make sure we have rosters that work in the coming fortnight. That will require some real flexibility and adaptation. Thank you all for working with us to make our plan work. The scale of changes @SWBHnhs is actually bigger than the initial opening plan for the Nightingale.
If you have queries about the Surge Plan please contact Liam.Kennedy@nhs.net
4. Have you found your place yet in our plan?
50 people have responded to our volunteerbrigade.swbh@nhs.net request, and another 40 have responded to the Nightingale posting above. Almost 400 are moving between wards. Getting on for 10% of our workforce are changing role temporarily.
You may well be playing a key part in our fightback against COVID-19 doing that new role or doing your current job. If you are unsure whether your current job has a place in the next 3 months of work at the Trust, do think about talking to your line manager and seeking clarity. This includes a “final call” to discuss any underlying health issues with your line manager or HR via ext. 3116. Later tomorrow Working From Home Guidance will be issued which will revise our arrangements as we look to move staff whose role is paused by events into new remits as part of our Brigades. In basic terms everyone at the Trust will either be (A) shielding/isolating/unwell; (B) in their current role; (C) redeployed as above; or (D) part of a brigade. Corporate roles that are (B) will go through a central scrutiny process over the next 10 days.
All of our arrangements will revert back at the end of the pandemic.
5. Exclusivity of service guidance
On Friday we issued brief guidance reminding colleagues that all professions the Trust is rescinding temporarily our contractual permissions to have a second or third employer, including an agency. The guidance issued is re-attached below together with details of how to pursue individual concerns about circumstance, which will be considered over the course of this week. The changes apply from Monday April 14th.