Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust

Throughout 2018 the wards at Pennine Acute NHS Trust have been encouraged to adopt the process of “Bedside handovers”. Pearce (2018) describes this as communication at the bedside, giving patients a chance to ask questions and be heard.  Adopting this process has proved challenging and staff have experienced uncertainties around sharing of sensitive information, protecting privacy, how to involve patients and ultimately how to use it effectively to improve staff and patient experience.

A 'Learning Matters' awards 2017 Case Study.

This eWIN Case Study looks at how Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust's e-Learning Team have designed Validate Your Care (V-Care), a one-stop evidence-based online learning portal for busy nurses. V-Care is designed to assess knowledge of fundamental nursing care of nurses working in acute adult care, and provide quality assurance to the public, patients and stakeholders that our nursing workforce is up-to-date, and practising caring and compassionate evidence-based care.

Reviewing the approach of in-patient physiotherapist services across all hospital sites at Pennine Acute, and in collaboration with the Department of Health’s Emergency Care Intensive Support Team (ECIST) this project took a cross-site approach to improve patient flow and experience.

Since 2008, the Diagnostics Division of Pennine Acute had experienced a high turnover of middle grade anesthetists   and had difficulty recruiting enough UK or EU nationals to fill the resultant vacancies. Therefore the Trust enlisted the support of Hays Recruitment Agency to undertake an overseas recruitment project in India, successfully filling all the required roles.

Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust recently embarked upon widespread service reconfiguration in line with regional initiatives, which led to the merger and closure of services at various sites across the Trust. As a result this redeployment  programme was launched to place all displaced employees into alternative substantive posts. This allowed 882 employees to be redeployed within the Trust, which saved circa £56,000 per person in redundancy costs.

This case study looks at how a Simulation and Clinical Skills team created a training programme designed for staff in community services at Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. Previously most training had been inappropriate mainly focussing on care in a hospital setting. The team wanted to redress this to give community staff the tools to deliver gold standard care to their patients. In April 2015 they approached the community teams at their governance meeting to ask what bespoke training they felt they needed to best serve their patients.

In 2013 the clinical skills and simulation team at the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust (PAHT) reviewed their existing training package regarding medicines management. Concerns were raised when some members of staff, who had made drug errors on the wards, were merely referred back to the same theoretical session they would have had previously. Impact evaluations revealed that existing theoretical sessions alone did not identify and challenge poor practice or reflect the drug errors happening in clinical practice.

In 2013, the Clinical Skills and Simulation team at Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust (PAHT) recommended that a patient-centred approach to care needed to be reinforced much earlier in health education.The purpose of this pilot study was to introduce simulation into the education of the multidisciplinary cadet scheme, currently run by the Skills for Health Academy.