I hope you had an enjoyable bank holiday weekend.

I am aware that issues are being raised by local residents regarding blood testing in our boroughs, so I thought it would be helpful to start off this week with a reminder of available services.

Blood testing in hospital and in the community

Blood tests are carried out both in our hospitals and in the community, depending on how the patient is referred. If the patient is under our care, they can have a test at one of our hospitals. We are also still seeing children under 12; parents and carers can book the appointment directly with the Children’s Outpatients team.

Patients referred by their GP need to have their blood test at a community clinic; children aged 12 and over can also be booked into any of these by their parent or carer. This is to limit footfall in our hospitals and keep our patients and staff safe. The North East London Foundation Trust (NELFT) is currently providing blood-testing appointments at ten community locations across our three boroughs, with the Hurley Group offering a bookable blood-testing service at Harold Wood Polyclinic in Havering. Housebound patients are supported by NELFT’s domiciliary blood-testing service which GPs can refer into directly.

Community blood-testing services are currently experiencing a high level of demand and our commissioners are working closely with NELFT and our GP colleagues to look at additional capacity. Please check all locations as some do have earlier appointments than others. We will continue to keep you updated on our blood testing page and you can also visit NELFT’s website.

Please be aware that we are unable to deal with issues regarding community services – these must be directed to NELFT or the Hurley Group, as appropriate.

Improving performance – four-hour emergency access standard  

We have seen attendances to our Emergency Departments (ED) start to increase, although they are still below where we were this time last year - so it is disappointing that we are not performing as well as we should against the four hour emergency access standard (95% patients should be seen treated and/or discharged within four hours) particularly at Queen’s.

We have developed a robust and rigorous plan to get back on track, however before I update you on this, I need to point out we measure performance differently at each site. At Queen’s, PELC treat all minor illnesses and injuries (known as Type 3) and our ED treats all Type 1 attendances (serious, life threatening illnesses and injuries). At King George PELC only treat minor illnesses – minor injuries are treated in our ED, and so the Type 1 data includes some Type 3 activity. 

Our programme of work has seven workstreams and takes a whole hospital and whole system approach, taking into account the patient journey from before they even step into our hospitals to when they leave us. Its development has been clinically led and each workstream has an Executive sponsor, and a dedicated clinical, nursing and operational lead. It considers the cultural and staff wellbeing aspects, and has strengthened governance and monitoring to improve oversight and accountability. Other steps we have taken include the launch of our same day emergency care unit (a service offering diagnostics and specialist input to help avoid unnecessary admission) and opened frailty units at both sites.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has stated we cannot go back to the days of overcrowded waiting rooms and we are working together across BHR and NEL to look at developing pathways for urgent and emergency care so patients access care outside of a hospital setting wherever this is best for them, so that our EDs can focus on treating patients who need emergency care.

I have every confidence that this combination of measures will deliver the improvements we need to make for our staff and patients.  

Academy of Surgery

I am delighted that two years after opening its doors, our Academy of Surgery has successfully prepared its first group of junior doctors with the skills needed to enter their higher level surgical training posts. The academy is led by Veeru Shatkar, our consultant and general surgery lead, who created stand-alone hospital based posts and a training scheme with rotations that are educationally equivalent to the national level training programme. It is testament to its innovative and exciting approach that after initially advertised six training posts, this was vastly increased due to such huge interest, with 26 junior doctors from more than 12 countries, including Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Greece. A new group will begin the course in October.

Staff stories

Each week I take great pride in sharing the fantastic stories of our staff. This week has a focus on our young patients, very timely with the children going back to school shortly. Children’s Emergency Department nurse Naomi Herbert stars in our latest In Conversation With… Naomi has just returned to her role after a year-long secondment as a clinical skills practitioner with our Resuscitation team, which included training many colleagues during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Naomi featured in our BBC News piece at the peak of the pandemic, when reporter Karl Mercer came to see some of our multidisciplinary staff training. You can see Naomi teaching resus skills after donning full PPE, for Karl’s piece.

Abbi Spurdle is a play specialist in our children’s Emergency Department. In her blog she explains the important role of her team in helping children, who might be anxious or worried, cope with and understand what is happening with their care, and how they have had to adapt during Covid.

Attend anywhere pods

To support online virtual face-to-face clinics, new pods are being trialled that provide dedicated private space for our clinicians, with the necessary equipment, to host the clinics with patients. You can read more about Attend Anywhere, an NHS-wide initiative that enables video consultations.

#DoingMyBit

We were delighted to support our colleagues at Havering Council who paid us a visit as part of the launch of their new #DoingMyBit campaign. Queen’s Hospital was one of the first places where their ad van pulled up, featuring messages encouraging people to do their bit in relation to the pandemic, such as wearing a face mask and keeping a safe distance from others. It’s also important we all follow the government rules on meeting up with other people.

Annual General Meeting                   

Last but not least, a reminder that this year’s AGM will take place on 30 September from 4.30pm-5.30pm. It will be a virtual event; the link will be publicised shortly. I hope many of you will join us as we look back over the last year. 

Take care and stay well.

Tony Chambers
Chief Executive