March was our busiest month on record. We had more than 30,000 people coming through our A&Es and urgent treatment centres, an increase of over 100 patients every day compared with March 2019. Our teams have worked incredibly hard to care for this growing number of patients and meet the national recovery performance target. Despite this achievement, we know too many people are still waiting too long.

We’ve started a phased opening of the new SDEC (Same Day Emergency Care) at King George Hospital – treating 11 patients on the first day (Monday 8 April).

On Saturday 23 March, Queen's Hospital hosted a drop-in session all about periods. The event ran for four hours and aimed to help young people feel more at ease when discussing periods and get answers to their questions. There was a turn out of around 30 teenagers.

Our Neuro Interventional Radiology (IR) team has become the first in London, and only the second in the country, to trial a new device, the Artisse intrasaccular device, for treating patients with brain aneurysms.

Congratulations to Sahara B ward at Queen’s Hospital, which has become the latest to achieve silver in our ward accreditation scheme.

Great-grandmother-of-four Iris Merry has praised our nurse, Anna Page, for helping to save her life when she had a cardiac arrest on the street in Romford.

Our atrium piano is back at Queen's Hospital. We had to move it during Covid, but now it's back in place. Colin, who loves playing this piano, has also returned.

So far this month, our A&Es have been extremely busy. On Monday 18 March, we experienced the most attendances we’ve seen in at least five years – with almost 1,200 patients through our A&Es and urgent treatment centres, and 119 ambulances arriving at Queen’s Hospital alone, way above what we’d usually see in an average day.

After almost six years, our Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Nick Swift, is leaving our Trust to spend 300 days travelling around 30,000km by car to his wife Niro’s home country, Sri Lanka.