Heartbeat: Seeing is believing at Midland Met

August 19, 2021

A community of half a million people is eagerly anticipating our brand new Midland Metropolitan University Hospital (MMUH). The opening will be the beginning of a fresh chapter in our ambitious journey to be the leading provider of integrated care in the UK.

Currently, we have over 800 people on site daily building our flagship hospital. The inside is changing rapidly and looking more like a hospital every day. ED will be the first area completed; colour vinyl is going down on the floors, and oxygen and gas boards are up. You can now start to imagine what clinical spaces will look like.

Each Friday, clinical teams visit the hospital to look at the areas they will soon be working in to help them plan how they will work there. These visits allow clinical teams to start considering how they can redesign their care pathways to help transform services in our new hospital.

We caught up with the nuclear medicine team on their site tour to discover how they are getting ready to move to Midland Met. Looking around their new area, Jenny Thompson-Peters, Chief Clinical Technologist, remarked: “Moving to Midland Met is going to enhance how we provide care. We will have improved technology with three SPECT-CT gamma cameras. It will allow us to make some protocol improvements – we currently only have one camera able to perform the full range of our tests.

“Seeing this space helps us to envisage where equipment will go and, we’ve started to look at how we will work together. We will also be integrated more closely into the imaging department. That will be a positive opportunity to build upon relationships with our co-workers.”

Jenny added: “We are pleased to see from the floorplan that it will be fit for purpose and compliant with our regulations. It gives us lots of food for thought and we are planning for how we will use this as a fully functioning clinical space.

“There are lots of ongoing discussions around the equipment we have going into the new department and how to best arrange it to promote efficient patient flow. We have been involved in QIHD sessions looking at patient journeys into various imaging departments and movement within the new acute hospital. One such example is that we will no longer need to use patient transport for maternity patients. Currently, it’s only about 100m from our back door, but it requires an ambulance to move patients between the buildings. Having that closeness between areas will help massively with how patients will move around the hospital and, it will improve their overall experience.”

Jenny continued: “In our last two QIHD sessions, we’ve reviewed large scale maps of our areas and discussed how patients will access the various departments based on whether they are attending from ED, AMU, wards or as outpatients. Looking at ways to be efficient, imaging is hoping to be supported by dedicated porters to reduce delays. It is one avenue we are exploring, but there are lots more. Using our QIHD sessions for these discussions has been valuable. It has opened up the conversation to all colleagues instead of just managerial staff.

“There won’t be many departments running outpatient appointments from MMUH, so we are conscious that our directions for patients will need to be clear. It is still early days, and we will need to visit again. This initial visit has been most helpful to help us start planning and looking at ways we can be efficient in our new workspace.”