Covid Response: Wotton Lawn Mental Health Inpatient Unit

morning my name's Laura I'm the ward manager and registered mentor half knows it's 10:00 to 7:00 in the morning I'd like to start my early shift okay and here's a team say hello well the covert 19 pandemic has changed everything about the inpatient mental health services particularly in the early part of the infection examples of that include redesigning the service away from a locality based reception ward to a covert orientated system where there's acute wards that now are designated as a covert ward or as a quarantine ward the service was fully redesigned about five weeks ago so we now take all our admissions into the hospital here people are swapped if they test positive we place them down on its own here encourage isolation if they're negative they go down to the other end nearly everything to do with Co very polarized that the way we work so we very much work on social inclusion least restrictive principles community engagement when KOed first hit we had to really read resumes of our core business due to this crisis when a water venture out of the hospital so a lot of our activities burn inside it's prevented families visiting and the very important connections to the community have had to be diminished and restrained so I just made my way up to the unit we've currently got a sign saying no visitors which the guys are taking really well considering actually because their families are normally really quite involved in their recovery it's changed a lot of very important comforting areas for people it is another dining room as you can see the tables and chairs are separated due to social distancing able to sit together if you're already feeling frightened and struggling to understand the world around you kovat 19 has brought a whole new layer of complication to that the effects kolben 19 coronaviruses had on my plan discharge back to the community the the impact is huge is impacting on everyone as a trust as a ward procedures and plans around managing this but it's still been really really tricky and really difficult for people to deal with when we first went into PPE some of our gentlemen were able to verbalize how they felt about that and they didn't like it they found it really quite intimidating in some ways it's been a positive experience people have learnt to come together but in some other significant although relatively rare examples it's presented particular challenges staff have been here they've been kept they've been spat at but despite all of that going on the staff have managed really really well and the other patients too we've had to think about how their best to keep ourselves safe we have good PPE here but sometimes we do get concerned but will it actually be effective and actually does the PPE work in terms of the PPE we have we have disposable scrubs which will wear on top of our work uniform we also have the availability of goggles and face masks gloves and visors for patients who are spitting at us I think one of the biggest worries for staff was not only taking the virus home to their to their loved ones and families but also bring them the virus in my wife who also works for the NHS contracted it and she was quayle she was off work for three weeks during that time I went to live in some local university accommodation so I could continue coming to work initially we saw quite a reduction in admissions to the hospital I think people were quite frightened and were willing to to try and cope in the community as times kind of gone by we've seen an increase in in the need for for inpatient care so we had redeployed staff coming from the community we had second and third year students given posts on the wards so given jobs we actually reconfigured our therapy team so they maintained a core service within the department but redeployed on to the wards and worked in very different roles PP stopped for the day or seems to be in order and as you can see over here we've got our visitors room unfortunately due to Kovac 19 it is now not a visitors room and we use it as a safe space for all the staff to get change into their scrubs mass user clean and wipes except for to get all set up ready for the day our use of information technology has massively improved and it's certainly something I take forward in the future we as clinicians are using things like Microsoft's a team which actually creates a lot more time in our working day we've got iPads on the wards for people to be able to FaceTime with their family members friends there is a benefit to face-to-face contact and I think we need to moving forward to figure out how we do that in a safe way patients in the hospital have been very accepting but at times they've come up with some very good ideas that we've been able to incorporate into our new ways of working staff have family loads in need to do their best by by guidelines to make sure we all stay safe as well as themselves the NHS generally and mental health inpatient services particularly have the ability and have demonstrated their capacity to work together and move past these challenges so we currently have five patients we've got two patients that have tested negatives and we're just awaiting them to be transferred to a green ward normally they will not pay here we offer a 7 day program of and largely community based therapies like to see and what having to adapt some of our practices at the moment by offering more water based a lot of our guys were using the gym out in the community as part of their rehabilitation program but since the Coburg 19 situation we had to be a bit more creative about sort of what we do or on the ward so we've got down here and he's just showing you a few exercises as part of his work out that he's doing in the Montpellier gym instead I think going forwards we're going to have to manage a hospital with the ongoing Cova Driss come in kovat isn't going away in the short-term we need to try and move back to our core principles our social inclusion our group work but we need to find new ways of doing that there isn't a template for this and I think we're going to have to do it gradually it's going to be little steps and we're going two steps forward and maybe one back as we move into the new ways of working but I think it will change the way we work I often hear this idea of a snowflake generation people that are in their twenties there can't code that aren't Brazilian but I think across the range of our staff group at all ages particularly the younger community they've been at work they've shown compassion and they've shown determination and I found it inspirational for someone like me in the twilight of my career that that generation and this current group of people have been able to succeed in the way they have I am constantly amazed by the staff at work in this hospital we go their numbers are reducing the isolation and that lockdown is working just keep at it so arguably this surge round one we've come through it as a clinical and a patient community and we're hopeful that the measures now in place will prevent a second surge

Channel: Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS FT

Views: 7,554

Rating: 4.5254235 out of 5

Keywords: Covid, mental health, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, NHS, Coronavirus, inpatient, hospital

Id: VIfRzsT2KSA

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020