A day in the life of....Carl Adams

My name is Carl Adams. I'm a transformation manager for Adults' Services in Southampton and head of people participation for Southern NHS. My normal roles are being completely turned upside down during the coronavirus. Currently I'm supporting many services across Adults' Services in Southampton. So today I'm going to video diary this to give an insight into what's happening with our services and my views and feelings. Currently I am supporting and bringing together the clinical leads for COPD, diabetes, tissue viability, stoma care, cardiac, and bladder and bowel services. Let's see what today holds. We're going to meet up with those teams, see if we can support them. A big role is getting PPE for the trust for Solent and Southampton services and making sure they've got enough kit before the day, working with our stock colleagues and making sure infection control guidance has been followed and people actually understand it. So let's see what today holds. Starts at our video throughout the day.

Right, so my morning's rush as normal. So far, done a clock call with all the community specialist services leads to see how they're getting on for the day. My reflection so far is they're actually doing okay, just kind of waiting for what's going to happen. Specialist bank holiday weekend that they're struggling a bit around working differently, still working mobile and not used to it, and actually miss that social bit of coming in. Practicalities around printing and posting letters out to patients, that's challenging for them. Also things around pay, whether it affects their credit or overtime, or if they have enough breaks. So those are the concerns so far. Also the demand on patients over the weekend coming out of UHS and whether we need to run the services slightly differently and do things like on-call. So that was the morning call with my CSS team. Second call of the day was the operations call across all of Southampton. That's going quite well. It works around different teams and different demands. Most of that has been around moving stuff around, and staff are happy to get trained up and work in different areas. Staff understand the anxiety, but they can crack on and do the bit they want because they're not skilled or not upskilled. There's support around that, a lot of shadowing which I think is working quite well, but that is another demand on our services as well.

A key role for today has been around PPE and ensuring that all Adults' Services homes and services have got enough PPE and understand the guidance and process. Another Zoom call I've done this morning with all the service leads and PPE champions. There's a lot of gaps around PPE, people are not quite following the guidance correctly mainly because it's kept changing so rapidly and people can't keep up. We're having issues with visors and wearing goggles and glasses. People want to be protected understandably. I'm now getting a trickle of patients who are positive. We're also having demands around collecting clinical waste. The processes are interesting. The communication and understanding across the trust, we've got some learning here. People do not either comprehend the emails or how we take on information. People need variation, need clear guidance. We're putting documents together that are just not user-friendly. They need good, clear plain English, need to be applicable to everyone, and visually good as well. Long documents are just too much for processing, and when people are anxious, I really feel there's a need for guidance around this to get a better format. People need to seek experts for this. We're rapidly putting a lot of new processes around collecting waste. As an example from today, people that have done this before or servicing them around this, do we have the admin support? How are we linking? How do we optimize our systems? How do we process? There's just variation across all services, so you've got to individualize it so much. But at least I guess they're all talking and all on the same call, which really helps. That's probably the model mover for how you get services working together more. I think this is kind of positive, this is happening. We're all finding we're working together a bit more across the system, but this is only within Adults' Services in Southampton. I can reflect on where it's further, I'm not sure.

Just a quick personal reflection here from following my calls this morning. It's definitely you need to be doing understanding around people. The people aspects of how people learn, take on information differently, how we create a little bit of humor, how we keep people engaged. It's challenging when you're not sat in a room when you're doing it, but I know these individuals. I'm fortunate to know many people, but you still need to create a sense of calm and the ability to work with these people. Bringing all engagement skills in is key. It's listening and being there for when they need it, and trying to have some of the answers. But it's moving all that by days that sometimes we just don't have the answers or we need to wait for clarification.

This afternoon I'm across the Western Hospital to help out around PPE. It's been a main focus. I've been quite keen to be getting on with business, but most of the conversation with staff has been around what's coming, is it happening, how's that feel, and when's everything going to happen. There's quite a lot of uncertainty still. On a personal note for this afternoon, it's about how we build those relationships. They're really valuable. I've done a lot of work building on contacts I have with system one colleagues across the trust. There's been some clear guidance around waste. I think these are really valuable skills to have when you're doing this kind of role and supporting services. I've also talked to some colleagues on the ground, the frontline, to see where they're at and how they're doing. This is invaluable. They're experienced staff but they still don't know what's happening. They seem to be managing well at the moment and they have everything they need, but it's that expectation and not knowing what the future is. They're also talking about the impact on their families and what that has every day. So yeah, good to keep in touch with a few colleagues and some frontline staff to see what actually is going on and how they're feeling.

Final part of the day, it's been delivering to community nursing PPE. Talked to them, they're saying the teams and the nurses are feeling a bit at ease because they've got the PPE they're taking out every day and have known little stock. It's making them feel a lot better and actually feel like they're able to do their job. So it looks like this guidance and having a bit of stability is really helpful at the moment. That communication is helping and reiterating the information of the correct PPE has really helped. So that's it for today so far. Maybe we do this again.