Nurses Day! - Birmingham Children's Hospital

INTRODUCTION
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Chairman & Chief Executive’s Foreword
This year we proudly celebrated our hospital’s 150th anniversary – for 150 years we have
been making a difference to the lives of countless children, young people and their families
from Birmingham, the West Midlands, across the UK and beyond.
We’ve taken the opportunity to look back at where
we’ve come from, where we are today and where
we want to be in the future. In true Birmingham
Children’s Hospital style we made sure it was a
year we wouldn’t forget, with lots of events and
activities to celebrate and reward our staff who
work tirelessly, day in, day out, to provide excellent
care to our children and young people. Without
them, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Keith Lester,
Interim Chairman
However, amongst the
celebrations we’ve
also had our busiest
year ever, with more
patients than we’ve
ever seen before.
We have coped well
by changing our
patient pathways and
making significant
improvements to our
facilities to make sure
we can continue to deliver
our high quality services
to more patients.
This includes
the opening of our Paediatric Intensive Care Unit
(PICU) extension, which increases our capacity
to 26 beds and 31 by 2014, and the launch of
our new outpatient pharmacy, which has made
it significantly quicker and easier for families to
collect their child’s medicine before they go home.
These developments provide a strong foundation
to develop our services for children and young
people with serious heart problems. Congenital
heart services are currently under national review
and at the end of 2012/13 we await the final
outcome.
A number of innovative projects also came to
fruition during the year to help us improve our
services and patient experience, including our 24-
hour Paediatric Assessment Clinical intervention
and Education (PACE) team, which was launched
to further support staff and parents of patients
who they feel may be deteriorating. It has been
a resounding success already and we look
forward to seeing how the team develops further
throughout the year.
Supporting PACE is our revolutionary Parental
Concern Project, funded by the Health Foundation,
to look at how we can help parents play a more
active role in their child’s care by developing an
effective assessment tool which measures their
levels of concern. This will continue into 2013/14.
Our award-winning Maple food ordering system,
which gives children and young people an easy
way to choose the food they want and reduce food
waste has been a big hit, as has our revolutionary
new Feedback App for smart phones, which gives
patients and families a new way to give instant
feedback on their experiences, good or bad, and
allows us to respond and make improvements in
real-time.
Another significant achievement has been our new
Dignity Giving Suit. Working with staff, children
and young people we have created a new outfit
to replace the traditional backless hospital gown
to give our young patients more dignity during all
stages of their care. The impact has already been
huge and some of our patients love them so much
they want to take them home!
Health Promotion has been an important theme
throughout the year for our patients, families and
our 3,300 staff. We’re leading the way regionally
and nationally with our work on the Making Every
Contact Count initiative to use every opportunity
we have with patients and families to deliver
brief health advice. We have also launched our
staff Health and Wellbeing Strategy which details
our commitment to supporting staff with fun and
interactive ways to stay happy and healthy.
We’ve also welcomed a number of high profile
visitors to our hospital during the year. Health
Minister Dr Dan Poulter came to speak to ward
staff about our feedback app and hear how our
Safer Children Audit No Harm initiative (SCAN) is
helping to reduce harm, and Lord Howe came to
learn more about our groundbreaking work in the
field of rare diseases. Secretary of State Andrew
Lansley officially launched our £3.7m 3T MRI
scanner on the 64th anniversary of the NHS and
Prime Minister David Cameron visited a few weeks
later to spend time with our nursing teams on their
ward rounds following the publication of the new
Nursing and Care Quality Forum report in May.
But of course this year has been a landmark
year for the NHS with Sir Robert Francis QC’s
final report into failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS
Foundation Trust. It has given every organisation
the opportunity to pause and think about the
services we provide. We have responded by
generating a large scale discussion across
the Trust to see how we can make further
improvements to ensure we continue to provide
high quality, dignified care at all times. This will
conclude in September 2013 and we already have
some powerful material from staff which we can
act upon to improve patient care further.
Nationally, the NHS has been preparing for
major changes to the way that local and national
specialised services are commissioned. This has
led to the development of fewer larger specialist
centres with more expert staff who can better
treat rare conditions and improve outcomes. It’s
a mark of the clinical excellence at Birmingham
Children’s Hospital that we have been designated
as a specialist centre for both epilepsy surgery and
major trauma.
4 5
Looking forward, we know we face a growing
population of younger people across the West
Midlands over the next few years. Teamed with
a worrying trend of conditions like asthma and
obesity, developments in medical technology
and an increase in demand for our specialised
services, we know we will be treating lots more
children and young people in the near future.
To make sure that we have the world-class
facilities that our children, young people and
families need and deserve, we have been busy
exploring options for a new hospital, either at
Steelhouse Lane or alongside our partners at
the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Birmingham
Women’s Hospital in Edgbaston. There is still a lot
more work to be done on this, which will continue
throughout the year, and we will be working closely
with staff, our patients and families and partners to
make sure we get this important decision right.
The NHS, like the rest of the public sector, is
facing severe financial pressures as a result of
the national economic situation. During 2012/13
we made over £8 million of efficiency savings. In
2013/14 we will work with our staff to ensure that
we can continue to deliver this level of savings as
the financial challenges are set to continue.
We’ve had another very exciting year at
Birmingham Children’s Hospital
with many significant
developments, achievements
and plans in place for a
great future.
We are well on our
way to achieving
our vision of
becoming the
leading children’s
healthcare provider
and look forward
to continuing our
hospital’s great
legacy for another
150 years to
come.
David Melbourne,
Interim Chief Executive