Wednesday 15 December 2020 will always be a milestone for our Trust, marking the day we opened our vaccination hub at Queen’s Hospital and sealing our place in history in the global fight against Covid-19.

Less than one month later we vaccinated our 5000^th person! And only ten days later we celebrated our 10,000^th . Our King George Hospital vaccination site also became a certified centre in March, allowing us to vaccinate thousands of local residents.

Since then, we've gone on to pass the 100,000 milestone and continue to vaccinate the hundreds of people who visit our centre every week!

It’s been an incredible start to a journey that will be a game-changer over time and we’re incredibly proud to be part of it, especially as we’re vaccinating our system colleagues too, including NELFT (North East London Foundation Trust) and local authority staff who visit and work in care homes, as well as London Ambulance staff and other frontline healthcare workers.

Getting the hub up and running was no mean feat. It was a whirlwind three weeks and even Nick Swift, Chief Financial Officer and executive lead for our vaccination hub, would need a calculator to work out the number of combined hours the vaccine taskforce and their teams spent getting the hub off the ground in such an incredibly short time!

Starting from scratch, a project of this scale would usually take far longer. However, the luxury of time was not afforded us – and it is thanks to the commitment, sheer determination, and solution focused attitude of everyone involved that we launched on schedule.

From setting up a new booking system to numerous hub walkthroughs, from procuring to prescribing, from fridges for specialist storage to installing a marquee in the green gym – not to mention countless WhatsApp vaccination taskforce messages flying around so fast it was hard to keep track – what everyone managed to pull off was been nothing short of phenomenal.

And then we topped it off – getting our King Gorge Hospital Vaccination Hub ready for launch in just seven - yes seven – days (!) and opened on 27 January.  

We find it inspiring to see our patients recover from Covid-19 and leave our hospitals to go back to their friends and family – and judging by the engagement on social media posts, so do you! To celebrate and mark their recovery we clap them out of our wards, and before they leave, they place a bee sticker on our Trees of Life that we have at each of our hospitals.

Here’s a few of our patients leaving us, some of whom have been with of us for weeks. You can also watch a recent feature on ITV news of one of our patients who recovered after two months in an induced coma. 

Rohit’s living his second life

Janet got home for her birthday after 89 days

Stephen was in an induced coma for two months – now he’s home

Desmond places his bee on our Tree of Life

89-year-old Rene places our first bee on our Tree of Life

Tracey cuddles her cat

Konda goes home

Our own consultants share their experiences of Covid-19

Fawad shares his experience of recovering from covid19

Thangadorai Amalesh

Almost overnight we had to change the way we delivered our services, from changing thousands of outpatient appointments to virtual clinics and increasing our critical care capacity five-fold, to setting up a renal dialysis unit in just 10 days and developing an innovative new multi-disciplinary training programme to support our Critical Care teams. Here’s some of the best bits that made it into the national media (as well as our local papers and masses of interest across our social media channels).

Oh and while we’re on the national media, we thought we’d be cheeky and highlight the BBC daytime documentary Saving our Nurses which followed the work of our nurse mentors.

The Evening Standard spoke to seven of our staff and the impact of dealing with Covid-19, in work battling the virus, and at home going back to their families.

ITV London visits our Intensive Care Unit

BBC Radio Four

• Showcasing how we're keeping our patients safe.
• Our Chief Medical Officer Magda Smith and Divisional Director of Anaesthetics Tomas Jervais became favourites on the BBC Radio 4’s World this Weekend programme

BBC London

• Our innovative training programme was worthy of a BBC London feature.

It wasn’t just the use of our wards areas that had to be agile and flexible through the peak of the pandemic – it was our incredible staff too.

Teams were redesigned, new rotas were developed, staff went to work in completely new areas and roles, volunteers were trained as healthcare assistants…everyone pulled together to look after our patients during the biggest challenge we have ever faced. Hear what they had to say below in our No Going Back video.

Meet our volunteer healthcare assistants

Kate Baker

Kate is one of our patient partners and wanted to help after we’d saved her life!

Chris Gammons

Chris had to pause his healthcare career after a stroke – now he’s getting it back on track

Mariauxy

Chef Mariauxy went from pots and pans to bed pans!

Lauren Groves

Lauren started a new journey after leaving the travel industry to join us

It was all change for many of our staff

Our redeployed nurses were proud to say they were there

Callum swapped a desk job and clocked up 20,000 steps a day!

Coral lent a ‘helping hand’

Simon, John and Lawrie from our theatres supported intensive care

Sophie achieved her long-standing ambition to work in our mortuary

A big thank you for their ‘helping hands’

Student nurses stepped up to support

Maternity Education Team Lead Kit reflects on how her role drastically changed