COVID-19 Bulletin: Wednesday 22 April
April 22, 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!
Thank you to everyone who has put forward an interest in being a Mental Health First Aider. Applications are now paused, given high levels of interest. We should be able to revert to people on Monday and confirm who goes forward for which department and when training will take place. Wellbeing is crucial – take a look at the movie at the foot of the page!
- Research is central to our next few weeks
Covid-19 demands that we think carefully about clinical practice, experiment, and learn. Our research work is central to that and we are enrolled in trails in critical care, Trust-wide, in respiratory medicine, and primary care.
To ensure all staff are kept informed of the current portfolio of studies which are open and in set up, our R&D team have created a dedicated page on Connect which is regularly updated with the study information. If you would like to get involved or need more information please contact Dr Derek Connolly, Director of R&D or Gina Dutton, Head of R&D.
2. Oxygen – it’s on prescription
Crucial to our focus on experimentation, innovation and consistency of practice, we are showcasing here our Oxygen weaning and how to prescribe oxygen in Unity. This is a really critical part of improving outcomes for Covid-19 patients and may not be your current or understood practice. Please read it carefully and make sure it is what happens now where you work…we can save lives!
3. Restoration and recovery – not yet
We have increasingly focused here on our plans to build a plan for after the first Surge. Toby Lewis will talk more about this in next week’s Covid-19 WebEx events on Wednesday 29th April.
But the crucial message to all staff is that existing arrangements stay in place. Working From Home guidance, redeployment, suspension of certain arrangements like SPA time etc. Neither employees nor managers should be reinstituting arrangements in expectation of the recovery plan, as its content and timing is some way off.
4. Working From Home? Thank you
On April 7th we issued guidance liberating more employees to start working from home. This included staff like medical secretaries and others involved in clinical administration. Do let us know if you are finding it difficult to get local agreement to WFH as that is the Trust’s standard for some key groups of staff. Of course you may be needed on site in future, or may need to do some brigade time on site. However, we are committed to supporting those essential workers who can WFH to do so, in line with our published four tests.
If you are WFH you should hear from your line manager routinely. If you are shielding or self-isolating you will hear from our HR team regularly. If you have fallen through the net get in touch via extension 3116.
5. Getting it right on PPE
We know that knowing the PPE rules, getting hold of it, wearing it right, managing the hot weather, and skin damage is tough. National narratives and rules can further confuse the position locally. Remember we work to our guidance, which considers national instruction. The Trust has no expectation of re-use or re-wear. We have strong stock positions and will continue to work with national and local suppliers to get what we need in place. We need you to do your bit by only wearing PPE in line with our guidance, so we can conserve stock (and that includes not wearing scrubs home – see yesterday’s bulletin).
Thank you to everyone who has come forward to work as a PPE Warden. These roles are essential to make sure that what we hope happens works well everywhere.
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 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 |
| 874 (870) | 478 (473) | 259 (254) | 65 (63) | 137 (143) | 602 (615) |
Take a look at our latest #kindness video