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A new end of life support service for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) patients and their families has been launched thanks to charity funding. The project, delivered in partnership between Compton Care and The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust Charity (RWT), will provide support to BAME patients living with complex and incurable illnesses. The post has been funded by NHS Charities Together COVID-19 appeal – which Captain Sir Tom Moore raised an incredible £33 million for.

A new drive-through spirometry service has been created to test patients with breathing difficulties, increasing testing capacity by over 200 per cent. Based at New Cross Hospital, the service allows patients to undergo lung function tests from the comfort of their vehicle. The test measures how much air a person breathes out, and helps to identify conditions such as asthma, pulmonary fibrosis, cystic fibrosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Two marathon runners have been shortlisted for the BBC Radio West Midlands ‘Make a Difference Heroes Award’ after raising £10,000 for The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust Charity. Stuart Bailey and Earl Edwards, both 47 and from Codsall, will attend the virtual ceremony towards the end of March hosted by singer Beverly Knight, and Matt Slack, an actor well known for his previous role in EastEnders.

As regular readers of my blog you will be aware I love to share positive stories about our staff, especially when it comes to winning awards. Congratulations then to our colleague Maria Tan, whose team won a national award and she herself has been nominated for a nurse of the year honour. Maria, an Advanced Clinical Practitioner in Gastroenterology based at Cannock Chase Hospital, has led her staff – Rosemarie Peralta, Rhodora Bloomfield, Olitha Dougall, Justine Hammond and Cindy Puccio – to the British Society of Gastroenterology’s Clinical Services and Standards Committee (BSG-CSSC) Service Development Prize 2020.

A hugely respected and long-serving consultant at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust is to retire after a distinguished career of more than three decades with the organisation. Dr Jonathan Mann, a Consultant in Respiratory Medicine, has been with the Trust since 1989. A former Clinical Director of Medicine, Dr Mann retires at the end of February having held many other advisory roles.

For this week’s blog I want to focus on how we have trained consultants to work in nursing roles to address the increased demand for intensive care beds in the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the Integrated Critical Care Unit (ICCU) at capacity and demand still rising, we had to quickly find a solution to increase the number of beds available to enable more patients to receive urgent care.

Welcome back to my blog! As I’m sure as all nurses everywhere will appreciate, work pressures have meant it’s been difficult to devote any time or effort to anything but work recently, which for me has forced the blog to be paused.  However, I’m back now, and with the care of our staff very much at the forefront of my thinking, I would like to focus on wellbeing.

The month of February is LGBT+ History Month – a period to raise awareness and advance education on matters affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender+ (LGBT+) people. The campaign provides an opportunity to reflect on how far we've come in supporting the rights of LGBT+ people, both nationally and within our own organisation, but to also think about how far we still have to go to ensure equality between people of all sexual orientations and genders.