New exhibition comes to the Trafford Centre as part of Dying Matters week

Dying Matters is a campaign run by Hospice UK that is working to create an open culture around dying and grief and break the taboo that stops us from talking about it. 

As part of the movement, Dying Matters Awareness Week is held annually and offers an opportunity to encourage all communities to get talking about death, dying and grief in whatever way, shape or form works for them. This year it will take place from May 6-12.

As with previous years, there will be a number of workshops, seminars, presentations, open days and many other creative and exciting events taking place across Greater Manchester to support this week.

The Network will be supporting the week with a series of social media posts and signposting people towards what is happening in the city region.  

One such initiative is being organised by NHS Greater Manchester’s Suicide Prevention Programme, entitled Projecting Grief – this is an online gallery exploring the relationship between loss, creativity, and healing. It will exhibit at the Trafford Centre during Dying Matters Week.

Two workshops are also taking place at the Trafford Centre, alongside the exhibition.

Pre-booking is required.

Creative Writing Workshop with author Freya Bromley 

Preserve a memory in paper with Jo-Anne Burgess

Also, the Greater Manchester Bereavement Service is going to be facilitating a bereavement workshop, on Wednesday, May 8, between 10am-12 noon at House of Books & Friends, in the city centre. More details here.

Picture above: a poster for the creative writing workshop at the Trafford Centre.

The Network held its first joint stroke and neurorehabilitation annual conference, which was attended by more than 150 people.

The day, at the AJ Bell Stadium, in Eccles, featured keynote speaker Professor Avril Drummond, who delivered an engaging and thought-provoking presentation on fatigue, which is one of the most distressing symptoms after stroke.

Another highlight was a talk by the Network’s new patient and public involvement co-ordinator Abi Bisset that featured a video of members of the newly-merged patient and carer group.

The event also offered a wide variety of both charitable and commercial exhibitors and plenty of breaks, giving attendees the chance to catch up with colleagues and learn more about services and products.

The poster competition produced its largest ever number of entries, which necessitated having two judging teams per category!

The climax of the day was the presentation of the Tyrrell and Chadwick Awards for outstanding contributions to stroke and neurorehabilitation care respectively.

The former was awarded to Dr Khalil Kawafi, stroke clinical lead at Fairfield General Hospital, former strategic clinical director lead for stroke and passionate champion of the region’s stroke pathway (pictured above with his wife Eva).

The Chadwick Award was presented to Harriet Allen, Trafford community team lead, who has supported a number of Network initiatives over the years.

The Network also presented a special achievement award to community director Tracy Walker who stepped down at the end of March after more than 8 years of innovative leadership.

You can view the slides and recordings of the talks, as well as all the posters from the competition here.

The Network has also been busy with its ongoing collaboration with the MND (motor neurone disease) Association and Greater Manchester MND Care Centre at Salford Royal Hospital.

In April, a second practical training event was delivered, focusing on psychological care, MND Association grants, expiratory muscle strength training, nutrition, advanced care planning, respiratory and patient/carer experience.

The event was part of a wider programme of work focusing on improvement of the region’s MND care. The collaborative nature of this project has proved to be an exemplar approach to pathway development and the team plans to apply a similar approach with other neurological conditions in the near future.

You can find out more about the Network here or follow them on X (Twitter) @GMNISDN

Pictured above: Attendees at the latest MND training session. 

The Network, together with the Greater Manchester and Eastern Cheshire Local Maternity and Neonatal System (LMNS), is now entering its second year of spearheading the Each Baby Counts improvement programme.

Called Each Baby Counts: Learn and Support (EBC), it is a national improvement programme developed by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and Royal College of Midwives, with the aim of reducing the number of babies who die or are left severely disabled because of incidents occurring during term labour.

Reports from maternity units across the country found that escalation was often a major contributor to incidents. EBC was set up to improve working practice and escalation, by focusing on behaviours, culture and psychological safety.

The LMNS has been involved with the programme for 12 months and Chloe Hughes has just been confirmed as continuing her role as project midwife, providing clinical leadership two days a week to help units implement and embed the toolkit across all sites. All trusts and maternity units across Greater Manchester and Eastern Cheshire have been involved and the training will be embedded with the workforce's mandatory training. 

Chloe was one of the original EBC learn and support local development leads, and the focus has been to drive the implementation and change in culture to improve psychological safety, communication, teamwork and prevent deterioration.

She said: “It has been an incredible year so far supporting some amazing teams to implement the EBC toolkit in each trust. They have been inspirational in developing the toolkit further, being creative in how to embed and roll out the workshops and fully embracing the ethos of the toolkit. 

“Teams across Greater Manchester and Eastern Cheshire have shared resources, practical ideas, inspired each other and have shown the difference early identification of deterioration, clear communication of the situation and an appropriate response can make to preventing a poor outcome.”

For the latest phase of the programme, the team has further developed the original toolkit and designed complimentary behaviour workshops, train the trainer sessions, review tools, campaign materials and visible leadership across each trust for the roll out, working with all teams across maternity, neonatal and theatre with the view to roll out across other areas in the hospital.

The aims of the programme are:

• To improve the ways in which we listen to women
• To reduce delays in escalation by improving the response to escalation and action taken
• To standardise the use of safety critical language
• To reduce feelings of hierarchy, creating a supportive environment which empowers staff of all levels to speak up when they identify deterioration or a potential mistake
• To promote a culture of respect, kindness, and civility amongst staff members, normalising positive feedback and saying thank you to each other.

Chloe added: “The teams are changing the culture in the maternity units, questioning current behaviours and the impact on future escalations if done poorly. I am really looking forward to this gaining momentum this year, involving larger teams to make a bigger impact.”

Following on from the work done on escalation behaviours and barriers, the EBC team is focusing on the practical use of the tools, documentation of the escalation and response and weaving it into all the other training, such as prompt study days.

It will also focus on behaviour workshops to include the full multi-disciplinary team, not just fetal monitoring. There have been comments on different areas that are challenging environments to escalation, so this will build on the amazing work the teams have done so far and also help leaders build escalation teams and champions.

Go to the Each Baby Counts webpage to find out more.

Pictured above: Chloe, third right, with the Saving Babies Lives Champions, which is a maternity programme with the aim of reducing pre-term births.

The Cardiac Network is pleased to announce it has two new members of the team.

Susan Casnello (pictured top left) has joined the Network as the new clinical lead for cardiovascular rehabilitation in Greater Manchester.

The team is excited to work alongside Susan to improve access and uptake of rehab for patients who have had a cardiovascular event.

Also, there is a big welcome to Karen Horrocks (pictured bottom left), who has joined the team as the new cardiovascular programme lead.

Karen has already begun work on heart failure, the cardiology oversight group, and the Stable Chest Pain toolkit.

Dr Easwari Kothandaraman (pictured right) has been appointed as the new clinical lead for the Network.

This follows a highly successful spell, since June 2023, leading the work on asthma within the Network.

She is a consultant paediatrician at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital.

The Network will be marking World Asthma Day 2024 with the launch of its asthma app across Greater Manchester.

The awareness day, on Tuesday, May 7, is organised by the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA), a World Health Organisation collaborative founded in 1993. The day is held each May to raise awareness of asthma worldwide.

This year, the theme is ‘Asthma Education Empowers' and aims to emphasise the need to empower people with asthma with the appropriate education to manage their disease, as well as recognise when to seek medical help.

The Network will mark the day with the launch of the asthma digital health passport app across the city region, which allows children and their parents to better manage and monitor their asthma at home or at school. Previously, a pilot scheme had seen the app available to a smaller number of people in the Manchester area.

The launch will be supported with posts on social media and as well as promotion to health professionals.

For the awareness day, GINA is also urging health care professionals to increase their awareness of the continuing avoidable morbidity and mortality from asthma, and the published evidence on effective management of the condition, so they are equipped to provide reliable information and optimal treatment for their patients.

Asthma is one of the most common chronic non-communicable diseases that affects over 260 million people and is responsible for over 450,000 deaths each year worldwide, most of which are preventable.

The SCNs’ support team celebrated Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, with a delicious lunch.

The joyous occasion of Eid al-Fitr was on April 10, and the team came together when they were next in the office on April 17 with some amazing food made by colleagues.

Highlights were samosas, spring rolls and pakoras, brought in by Afia Ali (Children and Young People Network’s senior project manager), Fatamah Shah (senior data analyst) and Wendy Javaid (education facilitator for cardiac diagnostics), and not forgetting a special mention to our star SCNs’ baker Fran Carbery (Children and Young People programme manager) who brought in some delicious scones.