Nurses Day! - Birmingham Children's Hospital

Shaping excellent care for tomorrow
We will continue to develop Birmingham Children’s Hospital as a provider of outstanding local
services - ‘a hospital without walls’ - working in close partnership with other organisations.
At Birmingham Children’s Hospital we now have
over 240,000 patient visits every year – more than
ever before - and although we do all we can to
make the hospital experience the best it can be, we
know that nowhere is as comfortable as home.
This is why we’ve been working with partners to
set up services to provide treatment and care out
in the community and in people’s own homes,
giving those with stable conditions a choice for the
first time. Not only does this help increase their
independence, it gives them greater control of their
care.
One new service is our Child and Adolescent
Mental Health Service (CAMHS) Home Treatment
Service which supports many children and young
people at home with their families instead of them
being admitted onto an inpatient psychiatric ward.
The 24/7 service covers the entire city of
Birmingham for young people aged 12 – 18 and
we’ve worked in partnership with Birmingham
and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust to
make sure that our older teens have a seamless
transition into adult services for their future care
and treatment.
Our Hospital at Home service has also expanded
over the last year, taking more patients from more
specialties, such as general paediatrics, plastics,
neurology, oncology and haematology.
Working in partnership with community nurses
and health visitors, our team of five supports the
care of children and young people across the city
of Birmingham and Solihull. This helps us save
hospital beds for those who need them the most.
Children and young people from South and Central
Birmingham with diabetes are also benefitting from
care at home through the Diabetes Home Care Unit
which has grown over the year and moved into a
new dedicated unit within our Steelhouse Lane site.
The team works closely with nurseries and schools,
providing expert advice to other regional paediatric
diabetes teams. It offers a 24/7 phone support
service and weekend drop in clinics to the 335
children and young people with Type 1 and Type
2 diabetes, Cystic Fibrosis related diabetes and
secondary diabetes from conditions such as cancer
or organ transplants, Bardet-Biedl, Alstrom and
Wolfram Syndrome.
As the number of diabetes patients we see is
always growing, we have had commitment from
the Board of Directors to expand by recruiting more
staff, including a social worker and family support
worker. This has helped secure funding from local
commissioners to provide more training for staff
and resources for patients and families, helping
us take huge steps closer to becoming a leading
centre in the UK.
BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE
We have also continued to work closely with
our NHS and local authority partners on the
Birmingham and Solihull Acute Paediatric Service
Review and we are leading the development of a
Children’s Health Network.
Networks and their development are a fundamental
priority for the Trust and this particular network
brings together clinicians from providers across
primary, secondary and tertiary care to look at how
we need to work in partnership and plan for the
future to make sure that children and young people
receive high quality, safe and effective care, no
matter what their condition is, how old they are or
where they live.
Other networks at Birmingham Children’s Hospital
include our oncology and cardiac networks which
are delivered in a ‘hub and spoke’ style. This
is where we act as the ‘hub’ of expertise and
deliver care through our ‘spoke’ partners such the
University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire
NHS Trust, enabling us to see patients closer to
home and strengthening the expertise of our district
hospital partners. These relationships will become
more important and will be further strengthened as
time continues, particularly if further reconfiguration
plans such as Safe and Sustainable take place.
WATCH THE VIDEO
CAMHS Home Treatment team picking up the Perfect Partnerships staff recognition award
42 43