COVID-19 Bulletin: Wednesday 27 May
May 27, 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 and June 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.
Antibody testing for the Trust kicks off Monday June 1st. Booking details will be released tomorrow. We have plenty of capacity over coming weeks and we want to ensure as many volunteers, staff and bank colleagues are tested as we can in month. Symptomatic people are excluded during that period and we are working through how to test those who are shielding. Keep your eye out for the test details as we look to ensure we are able to manage a test / trace / isolate environment at other lockdown arrangements come to an end in coming weeks.
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 |
| 1254 (1249) |
819 (817) |
351 (347) |
130 (127) |
84 (81) |
624 (611) |
1. Visionable helping keep our patients in the loop
Whilst WebEx has rapidly become something many of us are familiar with for meetings, for clinicians, another piece of software has become a regular part of their day: Visionable.
In order to help maintain appointments with patients, consultations and even some assessments are being done via Visionable, which operates a secure video call between PCs or mobile devices.
Dr. Derek Connolly (pictured above) is one of those clinicians keeping up with patients via the software: “Visionable is tremendous – you can guarantee you are free at that time, there are no distractions and you can do pretty much everything you can do in a face-to-face meeting. More to the point the patient doesn’t have the hassle of coming in, the cost of parking, etc. It’s time efficient for clinicians and patients alike. Obviously it can’t help with everything, but this method of patient contact is here to stay and will certainly help us with follow-ups in the future.”
For more information or to get set up with Visionable for your clinics contact Mark Whitehouse.
2. Elevators are red, they are also blue – and they’re marked that way for a reason
Our lifts have been clearly marked as either “red” for +COVID or ?COVID patients, or “blue” for those patients who do not have COVID-19 symptoms. The lifts also do not stop being red or blue just because you do not have a patient with you.
It is essential for safety that you use the correct lifts whenever you are moving around, entering or leaving our hospital sites and particularly when transferring patients who are moving between “red” areas. These patients should only be moved using the dedicated red lifts. Using the incorrect lift puts patients at risk, yourself at risk and your colleagues at risk.
3. Sandwell up next for the deep clean treatment
After some hard work over at the Birmingham Treatment Centre and BMEC, Sandwell is next for deep cleaning as we demonstrate we are #OpenForBusiness.
Cleaning has already begun and will continue at Sandwell across June, with the focus landing on City Hospital thereafter. To facilitate this there is likely to be some degree of moving about – for example Newton 5 will be moving temporarily today onto OPAU – to allow wards and other clinical areas to get the proper attention they need.
4. Working from home – revised guidance
To date the Trust has issued two pieces of guidance on this subject, the latest (i.e. the extant guidance) on April 7th. This new guidance will carry us to July 31st in the first instance. We plan to issue a longer-term strategy or plan about home working arrangements later in June to carry the Trust through the period to 2023 and to put arrangements on a firmer and more contractual footing. This ensures fairness for existing and new employees and clarity about eligibility and decision making. We expect this longer-term guidance to see more home working than pre COVID-19, mindful of social distancing and the open plan nature of office accommodation in particular in the Trust’s estate from 2022.
You can read the guidance in full here.
5. Reflect and decompress this Thursday at the Recharge Booth
A reminder that our Recharge Booth is open tomorrow – a ‘virtual’ space that allows you to come together with others, reflect, recharge, decompress, and join a safe and confidential discussion. Hosted by Richard Burnell every Thursday at 2pm, the booth will be sharing stories from different colleagues over a 20-30 minute session. By joining the Recharge Booth, we hope that colleagues will feel better enabled to maintain their health and wellbeing, and that it helps to support resilience in both personal and working lives.
For more information please contact Richard Burnell on 07747 144874 or Claire Hubbard on 07866 004575. Alternatively if you would like to be part of the Recharge Booth, drop an email to swbh.rechargebooth@nhs.net. A WebEx invite will be sent to your outlook diary, and you will simply need to click on the ‘join’ button to enter.
The Connect Coronavirus page is continually being updated with the latest news and guidance regarding the virus, please take the time to read and familiarise yourself with the available guidance.