At Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, we’re dedicated to upholding the core NHS principles of providing the best value for taxpayers and making decisions transparently.

We believe in making the most of our resources to benefit the entire Walsall community. Our staff, and indeed the Trust as a whole, are committed to the highest standards of integrity, ensuring NHS funds are always used wisely.

To support this commitment, our Declarations of Interests Register allows all staff to openly declare any actual or potential conflicts of interest. It’s crucial that all our staff avoid situations where there might be a conflict, or even the appearance of a conflict, between their personal interests and their professional NHS duties.

We publish the interests declared by our Directors and key decision-making staff in our public declaration registers.

You can view monthly updates of Declarations of Interest from our Board Members directly on our Board of Directors page [ADD LINK].

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the Trust Board Secretary [ADD EMAIL AND PHONE NUMBER].

At Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, we are committed to continuously improving the safety and quality of care we provide. Our approach to learning from deaths is guided by the National Quality Board’s “National Guidance on Learning from Deaths”, published in March 2017.

This vital national guidance provides a clear framework for NHS organisations on how to effectively identify, report, investigate, and most importantly, learn from deaths that occur within our care.

The purpose of this document is to outline Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust’s specific framework for identifying, reporting, investigating, and learning from deaths. This ensures we consistently apply best practices to enhance patient safety and the quality of our services for the Walsall community.

[source WHT version of this and ensure it is similar to that of RWT]

Declarations of self-certification sent to NHS Improvement by the Trust:

Self-Certification of G6 (PDF, 155Kb) [add if relevant to WHT]
Self-Certification of FT4 (PDF, 171Kb) [add if relevant to WHT

We’re pleased to confirm that Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust is fully compliant with the Government’s requirements to eliminate mixed-sex accommodation. This means we’re committed to ensuring your privacy and dignity during your stay with us.

We have the facilities, resources, and culture in place to ensure that patients admitted to our hospitals will only share sleeping areas with members of the same sex. Additionally, same-sex toilets and bathrooms will be conveniently located near your bed.

There are very specific circumstances where sharing with members of the opposite sex might occur. This only happens when it’s clinically necessary – for example, in areas requiring specialist equipment like the Critical Care Unit or the theatre recovery bay. It may also happen when patients actively choose to share, such as in our Renal Dialysis Unit, Rheumatology Unit, Chemotherapy Unit, and Paediatrics.

Should our care ever fall short of these standards, we will report it. We publish our results monthly via the Integrated Quality and Performance report at our Trust Board meetings, and in Quality Review meetings with commissioners.

In accordance with the Department of Health MRSA Screening — Operational. Guidance 3 (Gateway 13482), we have systems and processes in place to test the effectiveness of our arrangements, and to demonstrate compliance with our policy on MRSA screening.

These processes are designed to assure our Board of Directors and the public that every elective and emergency patient who requires screening is screened for MRSA.

MRSA Compliance Statement (PDF,  SIZE Kb)

The West Midlands Local Resilience Forum (LRF) is a partnership of member agencies, including those defined under the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) 2004 by responder ‘categories’:

• Category 1 responders are organisations that are directly involved in the response to an emergency. These are subject to a number of civil protection obligations.
• Category 2 responders are those who have a role to play in response but are less directly involved. The Act does not place such stringent duties on these but does require that they share information appropriate to managing emergencies and cooperate fully with the LRF.

The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust is a member of the West Midlands LRF and we are proud to work together with partner agencies to ensure that if an emergency occurs, we are prepared to respond together and minimise any impact.

In the event of an incident, the partnership agencies that form the LRF join forces to:

• Consider the hazards that feature in the West Midlands, assessing the impacts of the risk and providing this information to the public in a Community Risk Register [add anchor link to text below]
• Create plans to help make the risks safer, setting out how we will come together to respond should an emergency happen, and how we can help people get back to normal afterwards
• Ensure our response is coordinated when things do go wrong
• Carry out training and testing to make sure we are ready
• Identify lessons from incidents and exercises, learning as we go along to improve how we respond in the future.

Every Resilience Forum has a Community Risk Register (CRR) which describes risks for the community and assesses how likely they are to lead to an emergency and the potential impact they would have. The register is created through a risk assessment, and the information is used by the LRF to plan and prepare for emergencies that may occur.

The CRR focuses on serious risks that could result in an emergency, defined as:

• An event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom.
• An event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom.
• War or terrorism which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom.

Source: Civil Contingencies Act (2004)

The West Midlands CRR puts the national risks in a local context and whilst it doesn’t describe all risk it highlights those which could affect our routine day-to-day lives. View the West Midlands Community Risk Register (PDF, 4Mb)

The potential for national emergencies is determined by Government in its National Risk Register.

Read our Modern Slavery Statement