Dear colleague,

I’m proud to share that we’ve been shortlisted for ‘Trust of the Year’ in the HSJ awards. In just a few years, we’ve gone from being a ‘troubled trust’ in special measures to being a London leader in reducing our patient waiting lists and urgent and emergency care performance.

It’s all thanks to the hard work and dedication of our staff. We now rank among the top five trusts in London for our urgent and emergency care performance. We’ve won a parliamentary award for reducing ambulance handover delays in A&E and we’ve made our maternity services safer through improved management of pregnancy conditions such as hypertension and diabetes.

Our teams have led innovative projects like dedicated ‘Bones Weeks’ for orthopaedics and PrEYEority week in eye care, which focus on a high volume of cases to reduce waiting lists.

We’ve also supported our staff with a range of initiatives. Our Shadow Executive programme enables junior colleagues to get involved in senior decision making with a view to developing their careers, as well as projects with our senior intern team to reduce the turnover rates of our nurses.

And financially, we’ve made £30m in savings two years in a row and we’re now on track to reduce our agency spend to £7million in this financial year. This compares to £47million two years ago.

We know there’s still more to do, including our work to eliminate corridor care at Queen’s Hospital and improving patient experience when people come into our hospitals.

It was great to receive praise from Health Secretary and MP for Ilford North, Wes Streeting, who also acknowledged while things aren’t perfect, we’re determined to get better every day.

And that’s not the only HSJ award we’ve been shortlisted for - we’re also a finalist for the Performance Recovery Award for our specialist palliative care service based in our A&Es.

The team helps identify patients nearing the end of life and supporting those who would like to die at home to do so wherever possible. These nominations are a great boost for all of us and a sign we are moving in the right direction.

Winners will be announced at the awards ceremony in London this November. Fingers crossed!

A visit from the Chief Nursing Officer

We’ve also welcomed Duncan Burton, Chief Nursing Officer at NHS England, to Queen’s Hospital this week, where he visited Sunrise B ward to present a CNO award to the family of Vikki Thorpe.

Vikki was posthumously nominated in recognition of her nursing career and for working tirelessly to tackle inequalities in women’s health and providing the highest standard of care for patients with gynaecological issues.

Duncan also attended our maternity and A&E departments to see first-hand the work being done by our staff.

Best wishes,

Matthew Trainer
Chief Executive