Star Awards 2023 - vote now! Survey

Thank you to everyone who took the time to nominate a colleague or team this year as part of the Star Awards.

The Star Awards serves to recognise the hard work, determination, innovation and improvements colleagues have been able to deliver to patient care and experience.

This year has seen another wonderful turnout of nominations for colleagues and teams from every ward, specialty, department and directorate, with testimonials that share an insight into the fantastic care and service delivery that we pride ourselves on.

This year’s nominations naturally reflect all the other fantastic work that has taken place throughout the past year.

This year we need your help in three of our colleague voted for categories which are:

· Employee of the Year

· Clinical Team of the Year

· Non-clinical team of the Year

Remember, you can only vote once for each category so make your vote count. Hurry and get your votes in – you have until Friday 1 September, 5pm.

1.Employee of the Year

Dr Huma Naqvi, Ortho-Geriatric Consultant: Syeda Naqvi was appointed as the first ortho-geriatrician in the Trust around ten years ago, and since this point she has managed the whole orthogeriatric service single-handedly. She has a number of key responsibilities, such as managing the hip fracture management protocol, supporting the general surgery abdominal surgery patients in line with national protocol, and managing junior doctors in trauma and orthopaedics for several years now. This latter responsibility includes rota planning, training, teaching and mentoring. Dr Naqvi is also the well-being champion for clinicians in the Trust and goes out of her way to support colleagues. On top of all this, Dr Naqvi is also the training programme director for the geriatric service.

Sue Hunt, Palliative and End of Life Clinical Service Manager: Sue is the leader of the palliative care service. She demonstrates compassionate leadership in seeking to understand, support and empower her team to be the best they can be. She has helped innovate several new aspects to our service, including development of the discharge enablement team (DET), creation of ACP roles, specialist education provision and the creation of a specialist palliative care virtual ward, as well as building relationships with partners to facilitate good end of life care. With a passion for the care patients receive as they approach the end of life, Sue is focused on innovation, as well as being committed to the wellbeing of her team and her Trust colleagues more broadly. Alongside the leadership of the palliative care service, she has relaunched and developed Trust-wide Schwartz rounds this year, creating opportunities to process the emotional impact of working in healthcare.

Susan Edwards, Lead Bereavement Nurse: Sue is the lead bereavement nurse at SWB. Striving every day to help colleagues to make a difference when looking after a patient at the end of their life, she has made a huge difference to staff and families. She teaches her colleagues the importance of supporting patients and their families throughout the full process, including after their loved one has died. Sue is dedicated and committed to her role and is determined to ensure that the quality of care after death is improved to help family members deal with their bereavements.

Jade Reberio, Advanced Clinical Practitioner in Urology: Jade is an advanced clinical practitioner in urology who has made a phenomenal contribution to the Trust since starting in the Summer of 2022. She arrived with plenty of clinical experience in palliative care but was new to urology and spent several months learning, observing, patiently listening and reading, making incredible progress with her knowledge. After the induction period, Jade has taken over the reins of the nursing team for urology, making multiple noteworthy contributions. These include spearheading the transfer of prostate biopsies from theatres into outpatients, thus freeing up significant theatre capacity and cutting down waiting lists. Jade has learnt how to perform flexible cystoscopies independently, and now is able to run her own clinics which has increased the Trust's capacity in haematuria assessment, as well as training herself to work on SDEC for surgical emergencies. She is now being trained to perform prostate biopsies independently and will soon be able to increase capacity in this area.

Rajeev Pathak, Operations Manager, YHP PCN: Rajeev is an operations manager at SWB, joining the team in 2021. Upon starting in the role, he used his knowledge, skills and experience to transform the service that patients receive at YHP by developing our telephony team into a professional contact centre. Rajeev has introduced a significant upgrade to our cloud-based telephone software, enabling the reporting of individual performance to improve efficiency and service. Using his contact centre background, he has developed and launched an induction and training programme for new colleagues joining the frontline operations team. This has received excellent feedback from colleagues, with one stating it's the best induction they have ever received. In addition to the above he has been a tireless advocate for widening participation, championing a number of schemes to give opportunities to a wider range of people. This has led to the recruitment of nearly ten colleagues from these schemes.

2.Clinical Team of the Year

iBeds wards: iBeds provide specialist integrated therapy and nursing services across inpatient wards, community wards and into our local SWB community. A significant recent achievement is their implementation of the Re-condition the Nation project at SWB. Re-condition the Nation is a campaign designed to encourage health and care teams to identify and implement ways to reduce ‘de-conditioning’, which causes people to lose fitness or muscle tone, especially through lack of exercise. As part of the campaign, the community wards decided to introduce a reconditioning project on their community wards. Having seen an increase in patients experiencing functional decline due to acute episodes of care, there was very little therapeutic activity happening in the wards, so this campaign helped them focus on what was needed for their patients and staff. Staff endeavoured to ensure the project was as inclusive as possible in all activities, with the aim of improving patient experience and wellbeing while supporting carers. The project has been embraced by patients and their loved ones, with wards seeing around 20 patients participating for a one-hour session every day.

Urgent Community Response Team: The urgent community response team responds to crisis patients within two hours, prioritising the needs of crisis patients in Sandwell to ease the pressure off the ambulance service, local emergency departments and 111. As well as preventing hospital admissions and providing emergency care for patients in their own homes, they have been able to grow their own trainee ACPs and support other teams to train nurses to carry out health assessments and prescribe within the home. They have continually met their two-hour response time in 90% of cases, whilst supporting all other services in Sandwell, sometimes remotely. They also work well within the Community Navigation Centre liaising with district nurses to ensure safe care is delivered to patients in their own homes.

Cancer Hotline Team: The cancer hotline was established in 2022 to provide Sandwell residents with a dedicated resource they can call if they are concerned about symptoms of cancer. Facing funding and staffing issues, the team worked tirelessly to set up this unique service, working collaboratively with both NHS England and the West Midlands Cancer Alliance. They have seen more than 300 patients since they launched and have referred over a third of those to a two week pathway. The service is taking some pressure off primary care, triaging and returning calls within 48 hours. They provide reassurance to those patients not deemed urgent or who do not need further referral – and for those patients who require further investigation, they refer extremely quickly to the appropriate service without the need for the patient to visit their GP.

Rapid Response Therapy Services: RRTS are an established team who work across both City and Sandwell emergency departments and acute medical units to provide therapy assessments to patients who are having difficulty with their mobility, falls, cognitive impairment, difficulty coping at home, impaired strength/gait/balance or musculoskeletal injury. The team, made up of OT's, physio's and therapy assistant practitioners, are proactive and efficient, preventing a number of admissions every day. They provide a seven-day service from 8am to 8pm, ensuring that some of the most vulnerable patients in our community receive a detailed assessment of their needs and have effective treatment and community follow up as required. This team is vital in supporting patient flow, promoting a home-first approach in all that they do. The team have been crucial in supporting unfunded bed closures, expanding the areas they cover to support the Trust to improve patient flow.

Sickle Cell and Thalassemia Centre: Based at City Hospital, the sickle cell and thalassemia (SCaT) service offers a nurse-led day-case pain management service, enabling people to attend the ward to manage their sickle cell crises without having to present to the emergency department. The team work tirelessly to not only improve the patient pathway, but to educate people throughout the Trust to increase understanding and ensure a high standard of specialised care is delivered. In the last year, their achievements include offering training, awareness raising and an introduction to SCaT for all junior doctors who join our Trust, supporting patients in ED, or where possible pulling patients to the department immediately to support flow. They were one of the first centres to introduce Crizanlizumab as a treatment to help prevent sickle cell crises and reduce length of stay, and they have a compliance of over 99 per cent against the NICE standard of analgesia within 30 minutes of arrival in Sickle Cell Crisis.

3.Non-clinical Team of the Year

Clinical Effectiveness: The clinical effectiveness team works to support clinical services to deliver best practice for our patients and population. The team do this by supporting our people to complete clinical audit projects and implement improvements, as well as supporting the development of local clinical guidelines, disseminating newly published guidance from the National Institute of Care Excellence and facilitating the Learning from Deaths process at SWB. The team haven’t been fully staffed since the summer of 2020, with 2022 bringing some particularly difficult capacity issues to navigate. Despite this, the small team has demonstrated resilience by overcoming everchanging challenges, maintaining service delivery and continuing to look for ways to improve their processes to better support our people and patients. For example, the team used quality improvement methodology to tackle the challenge of incorporate a new clinical effectiveness national standard at SWB.

Human Resources: The human resources team work across a number of areas, with notable recent examples including organisational change, job matching, and the implementation of the cultural ambassador program. The team has guided and implemented a significant organisational change programme as we move closer to moving towards MMUH. Their commitment to promoting effective job matching has been instrumental in aligning employee skills, experience, and aspirations with suitable roles within the organisation. The team has played a pivotal role in implementing and nurturing the cultural ambassador program, which has fostered a diverse and inclusive workplace environment. The HR team has exhibited exemplary dedication, expertise, and a collaborative spirit, resulting in transformative outcomes and positive impacts on the Trust.

Chaplaincy: Our multi-faith chaplaincy team offer support to patients and colleagues alike and offer guidance equally to those with faith and those without. The team develop and maintain prayer spaces, allowing staff, patients and visitors to seek solace during difficult times after receiving a warm welcome from a member of the chaplaincy team. The Chaplaincy team visit many of our patients weekly across all of our sites and provide a safe space and sanctuary at a time of need. They provide support when we are at our most vulnerable and provided invaluable support to all during the pandemic. Available 24 hours a day, whether they are called out in the middle of the night to attend to an end-of-life patient, a mother who has undergone a stillbirth or to defuse a situation, they drop everything in their personal lives and attend to patient and colleague needs.

Single Point of Access: Single point of access was first launched in Autumn 2018, hitting 1000 cases per month before Christmas in 2018. Their service enabled our GP partners to be able to refer patients to the required specialty directly, reducing wait times, avoiding unnecessary administrative work and preventing harm to our patients due to the wait. SPA also helped reduce pressure on the emergency department as well as unnecessary hospital stays. With the SWB team outperforming other providers in terms of response time and activity in their first operational year, the service has continued to expand over the past few years, becoming the exemplar and sharing good practice with many fellow providers.