9 minute read
Staff celebrate AHP Day
Celebrating Allied Health Professional Day
Allied Health Professionals (AHP) make up the third largest workforce in the NHS, and there are more than 1100 AHPs working across many professional groups at Leeds Teaching Hospitals.
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During AHP Day, on 14 October, Chief Nurse Lisa Grant met virtually with a representative from each professional group to discuss their reasons why it’s great to be an AHP. Lisa was delighted to be part of the celebration and recognised the contribution AHPs make to patient pathways and experience. She was very keen that AHP voices were heard and offered her support to ensure AHPs’ contributions and value are represented in the organisation. Although the group couldn’t meet in person as they have done in previous years, AHPs across the Trust connected with each other and with colleagues across the country using social media to share and celebrate their profession. This year a competition was also held, where AHPs were asked to design a poster or take a creative photo that best represents their profession. There were some great entries which showed not only the pride AHPs have for their profession, but also the care and respect colleagues have for their team members - truly representative of the Leeds Way values.
The top three entries in the competition were:
1st Place - ODPs (“Who you gonna call”) 2nd Place - Paed Radiographers (“Funnybones”) 3rd Place - Orthoptics (“Rainbow vision”) Thank you to Leeds Hospitals Charity who funded prizes for the winners.
Paper Lite delivers Trust-wide benefits
Along with many other teams across the Trust, the Covid pandemic has seen the Corporate & Health Records team completely change the way they work. With restrictions around document handling in place, they have quickly adapted to a different way of delivering their service, using digital solutions to help.
This approach, known as Paper Lite, involves digitising paper Medical Records, which are scanned and uploaded into ppm+. Paper Lite is a key step in our digital journey, providing many efficiency and sustainability benefits, and also building upon the investment made in ppm+, contributing to an increasingly rich electronic patient record. Paper Lite has also played an important role in supporting our Covid Infection Prevention regime by significantly reducing the volumes of documents and people moving around the Trust.
The team run a comprehensive Pick-up & Scan Service for all in-patient and outpatient areas, and the Clarendon Wing Library, which was previously full of paper records, has now been closed down.
George Floyd and me: What can I do to eliminate racism in the workplace?
Ester Jamera Nick Clark
Ester Jamera, Senior Project Nurse for diversity and inclusion and Co-chair of the BME Staff Network, and Nick Clark, Senior Communications Officer, explore how White colleagues can use allyship to make a meaningful difference to the everyday experience of their BME colleagues and help make LTHT the best place to work for all.
When the video of George Floyd’s brutal arrest and killing was shared online in May 2020, it sent shockwaves around the world. The incident cast a harsh spotlight on the discriminatory treatment faced by Black people in America and gave a new urgency to the messages championed by the Black Lives Matter movement.
For many BME staff at LTHT, racism and discrimination often impacts their everyday experience at work. Many people from a White background have now started asking questions about their own beliefs and views on race and racism, privilege and discrimination, and what they can do to make a difference.
What is allyship and why is it important?
Allyship is a process of building relationships with marginalised groups or people based on trust, consistency and accountability. Allyship encourages one to understand the experience of others, especially those who don’t look or sound like us. In order to create a workplace with equity we must be intentional in bettering ourselves and each other for the common good. Allyship is a one of the concepts that supports us in this endeavour.
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In October last year, the Trust launched the I-APPLAUD BME allyship initiative. The initiative aims to encourage and support White colleagues to actively participate in the equality, diversity and inclusion of BME staff across all levels of the organisation. Allyship is a role and a choice we step into. We can be an ally behind the scenes or choose to be very visible in our support. Being a BME ally doesn’t necessarily mean you fully understand what it feels like to be on the receiving end of race inequality. It means you’re taking on the struggle for equality, diversity and inclusion as your own to help create just systems and workplaces.
Simple Actions - Big Difference
• Be observant and aware of discrimination and harassment in the workplace. If you observe discrimination or harassment:
- Check in with the victim
- Challenge and call out the offence if safe to do so
- Report the incident and seek support • Attend personal development opportunities that aid your understanding and equip and empower you to contribute to the Equality,
Diversity and inclusion agenda. You can access a number of these opportunities via ESR. The Equality and Diversity Team can also deliver bespoke sessions for your team if needed. • Look out for trustwide, citywide, regional and national campaigns to end
racism in the workplace, and see how you can join in. • Take a look at the I-APPLAUD initiative in full by searching for BME Staff
Network on the Trust Intranet
• Join the BME Staff Network (it is open to all LTHT staff and volunteers) and attend their regular meetings where possible to connect and hear the latest news and issues.
Initiate a conversation with a BME colleague
Why not step outside your comfort zone and talk to a BME colleague and ask them about their experiences in and out of the workplace? Here are some ideas for the best way to do this. No one likes being put on the spot. And this is even more likely to be the case when it comes to talking about race. So on your initial conversation with BME colleagues avoid the ‘Where do you come from? No, where are you really from?’ questions. Asking ‘Where do you really come from?’ implies that you do not think they come from the UK and are not British simply because they are not White. For all we know they could have been born here including their parents and grandparents. Why not offer up some insight on your own cultural heritage first? You could follow this up with where your own family originate from. This sets a pattern for the depth of response you’re looking for, rather than the awkward situation of hearing about where someone lives right now when what you are really interested in is their cultural heritage. For BME staff - If you are keen to share your story and no one has asked you, be courageous and create opportunities for yourself to share.
Listen carefully and acknowledge what your BME colleagues are saying
When BME colleagues are sharing their experience, seek to understand and not dismiss or attempt to explain away their lived experience. At this point resist the temptation to share your own story as it risks undermining the story
your BME colleague is sharing and will negatively affect the level of trust you can build. Check for clarity about what you have heard or play it back to confirm understanding and ask the impact of their experience on their life. It is also important to be mindful that whatever we are hearing, the individual will be speaking from their own experience and not on behalf of everyone from a similar ethnic origin. Appreciate and acknowledge what you hear, even if you don’t relate to the experience that has been shared or don’t feel that you really ‘get it’. It’s the individual’s experience - they have lived it, so it is vital to accept what you hear on that basis. Always thank the person for sharing their story – it is likely it has taken them a lot of effort to open up to you.
What’s next?
There’s plenty more you can do to be a meaningful ally to BME colleagues at the Trust, with many resources available at the LTHT library and online. For a starter, search online for Sandra Kerr’s ‘Let’s Talk About Race’ handbook, which helped inform this article, and has some good pointers for getting past the starting blocks in talking about race and racism in the workplace.
Contact details:
BME Staff network: leedsth-tr.BME@nhs.net E& D: Leedsth-tr.editeam@nhs.net LTHT Libraries: www.leedslibraries.nhs.uk
Leeds goes live - scaling up digital pathology across the country
LTHT’s digital pathology journey has reached new heights of achievement as the National Pathology Imaging Cooperative (NPIC) launched on 1 January. Its mission is to create the infrastructure and knowledge for the NHS to be a global leader in digital pathology and artificial intelligence (AI).
A new £20m investment will enable NPIC to deploy scanners across 15 hospitals in the North and a further 25 hospitals throughout England. The high-tech, data-driven artificial intelligence initiative is led by the Trust and includes the West Yorkshire NHS Trusts, the Northeast pathology network, York, and Hull Hospitals. It also funds two national networks in childhood tumours and in bone and soft tissue tumours, led by Great Ormond St Hospital and Royal National Orthopaedic Hospitals.
NPIC will have the capacity to scan over 2.3m images per year, creating 3 Petabytes of data, and spans across all 29 pathology networks in the country, propelling the NHS to the leading position internationally in digital pathology and artificial intelligence. NPIC will also provide a platform to run clinical trials and build diagnostics capability in collaboration with the life sciences industry. Director of the programme, Dr Darren Treanor, Consultant Pathologist at LTHT, said: “This significant investment allows us to use digital pathology to help diagnose cancer across the NHS and provides a large platform on which we can develop artificial intelligence tools to be used around the world.”
Since the latest funding announcement was made a £1m refurbishment of the National Training Centre for Digital Pathology at St James’s was carried out, which will accommodate training and workshops, dedicated resources and expertise in digital pathology and AI. Dr Phil Wood, Chief Medical Officer at LTHT said: “Digital pathology is becoming a key enabling technology for both clinical delivery of cancer and wider disease diagnostics. In addition to improving patient care in our hospitals, this programme will also teach others how to use this technology and report cases remotely, an area that has increased in importance during the COVID-19 pandemic.” NPIC is one of the centres to receive funding as part of a £50 million investment in innovative technology for Data to Early Diagnosis and Precision Medicine announced on by Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock in August 2020.
