About our Trust

Under the leadership of our Chair Jacqui Smith and Matthew Trainer, our Chief Executive, we provide care to residents of three of London’s most diverse boroughs. More than half of our 7,500 strong workforce are from black, Asian and minority ethnic groups and most live in Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge. We also provide healthcare services to people in south west Essex, and specialist neurosciences services to the whole of the county.

Our services include all the major specialties of large acute hospitals, operating from King George Hospital (KGH) in Goodmayes and Queen’s Hospital in Romford, and we have two of the busiest emergency departments in London. We also provide outpatient services at Brentwood Community Hospital, Barking Hospital, Loxford Polyclinic, and Harold Wood Polyclinic.

We are particularly proud of our regional Neurosciences Centre; Radiotherapy Centre; Hyper Acute Stroke Unit; and dedicated breast care service at King George Hospital and are pleased to be part of the NEL Cancer Alliance.

We see the challenges of our boroughs as our strengths – they provide us the opportunity to look to the future and deliver care differently and innovatively, in ways that best support access to services, and provide interesting and unique career opportunities for our local people.

Our communities will benefit from our closer collaboration with Barts Health. We have deepened our relationship as we have come together to form one integrated group of seven hospitals, with a Chair in common in Jacqui Smith, Shane DeGaris as Group Chief Executive and Accountable Officer of both trusts, And Matthew Trainer as Deputy Group Chief Executive.

The Acute Provider Collaborative brings Barts and us together with Homerton Healthcare; and jointly with other alliances such as those at PLACE (combining the NHS, local authorities and other local organisations with responsibilities for planning and delivering services such as the voluntary sector) and the North East London Health and Care Partnership, will drive our collective focus to reduce the inequalities Covid-19 highlighted so starkly and ensure all our residents have equitable access to services.

As we continue to recover from the pandemic, we’re proud to be leading the way nationally in reducing the time our patients wait to get the treatment they need. It provided the catalyst for our teams to innovate and change, and we’re tackling the backlog in many ways including blitz weeks; state-of-the art diagnostic equipment; and streamlining the way we work. We’re delighted this will be strengthened as we progress over the coming months with our purpose-built community diagnostics centre at Barking Community Hospital.

We’re proud our work continues to be recognised by national leaders. Following a visit to our Elective Surgical hub at KGH – one of only eight in the country to have achieved formal accreditation – Sir David Sloman, Chief Operating Officer at NHS England, said: “The Trust is doing some brilliantly innovative things. It was a pleasure to visit a unit that is clinically led, patient centred and driven by a leadership that is absolutely focused on improving things for staff and patients alike.”

We know we need to improve waiting times for urgent and emergency care; our performance against the four-hour emergency access standard remains challenged, in comparison to many other London trusts. We’re encouraged that we’ve started to see improvements in our Type 1 performance (our most seriously unwell patients) since we opened our expanded Same Day Emergency Care, established to avoid patients being admitted unnecessarily and continue to focus on new initiatives. However we know there is more to do, and this will be one of the many benefits of our closer collaboration with Barts Health and others. Together we will find a sustainable solution to enhance patient care.

Importantly all our work will be underpinned by our digital transformation programme, which will see us align with every other London trust as we progress the implementation of our electronic patient record.