Dear colleague,

This week there will be a significant impact to services across our hospitals due to industrial action by resident doctors (previously known as junior doctors). They will be on strike from Friday 25 July at 7am until Wednesday 30 July at 7am.

We’re doing everything we can to minimise the disruption to our patients. We’ve rearranged more than 1,000 outpatient appointments and more than 100 non-urgent surgeries to ensure we cover emergency and maternity care throughout the strike and keep patients safe.

Patients who need urgent care are being prioritised, including those who have experienced longer waits and cancer patients. We’re contacting patients to let them know if their appointment will be affected and we’re encouraging patients who don’t hear from us to come in as planned.

Our A&Es will remain open during the strike. Patients should continue to come in for life-saving care as usual, but if it’s not a life-threatening emergency please contact your local pharmacy first, your GP or phone NHS 111.

Making deep brain stimulation safer

Our staff are always finding innovative ways to provide better care for our patients. One such example is in deep brain stimulation surgery. This specialist surgery is for patients with movement disorders including Parkinson’s disease.

In the past, patients needed to be scanned both before and after surgery, meaning they had to be moved from the operating theatre to Radiology and back again.

Now thanks to a method introduced by neurosurgeon Abteen Mostofi, we’re using an Airo mobile CT scanner which means it can be done in theatre during their operation.

This makes it safer and we’re also saving up to an hour and a half every time. I’m really pleased that many of our patients have already benefitted from this and will do in future. I’m proud of everyone involved in making this happen.

Feedback on care we provide

And finally, it’s brilliant to hear positive feedback from patients about the care at our Trust. A patient wrote to me to praise staff who helped her after a fall.

She wrote: “I particularly valued the regular updates from the clinical team, which made a difficult time much more manageable.

“The nursing staff displayed remarkable professionalism and enthusiasm in their duties, for which I am truly grateful.”

Alluding to corridor care, she said: “Your staff did their very best, in what was difficult working conditions. You should be very proud, as you have an extremely professional team.”

This kind of feedback shows us why investing in better infrastructure is so important and, as you know, we launched our £35million campaign earlier this year to transform our A&E.

Best wishes,

Matthew Trainer
Chief Executive