Lots of our staff were redeployed into new roles during the pandemic, for speech and language therapist Dani Ferraris, she found herself doing her usual critical care role, ‘to the max’.

Last month, we introduced Connected Care; a way of making patient GP and hospital records more easily accessible to staff. And the system had an instant impact when a patient with a complicated background was admitted to King George Hospital just before the start of the Easter bank holiday weekend.

Doctors from our Children’s Emergency Department (ED) are launching a national study to investigate the characteristics of children and young people presenting to ED with diabetes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Clare Bailey, our Divisional Director of Healthcare Professionals, has spoken out about her stammer after finding the impact of the pandemic has made it harder to control. She hopes sharing her story will encourage others to be more open, and realise it doesn’t matter if you do stammer.

We’re pleased to be able to share that from Monday (12 April) partners will be able to attend all maternity scans.

Our patients are at the heart of everything we do and as a Trust, our vision is to provide outstanding healthcare to our communities. This is why Patient Partners at our hospitals are so important; as we believe hearing their views will help us improve our services and the overall patient experience.

Our Homefirst discharge programme ensures assessments for our patients’ rehab, equipment and care needs takes place in their own home, which gives a much more accurate picture of the level of support they actually require. This also ensures long-term decisions are not made about their future while they are in hospital.

We are pleased to be part of a national trial which will see patients swallow a capsule containing a tiny camera to test for suspected colorectal cancer.

The colon capsule endoscopy is a new innovation and means patients can be diagnosed sooner than a traditional endoscopy, which involves the patient visiting hospital and having an invasive procedure called a colonoscopy.

We’re delighted Mehboob Khan has agreed to become one of our non-executive directors (NED) on our Board where he will help to oversee the running of our hospitals. He has extensive experience of the NHS, having been one of our Board Advisors and, more recently, an Associate NED.

Angela Simiyu, a staff nurse on Bluebell B at Queen’s Hospital, used to be quite reserved at work. She would come onto the ward and get on with her job, but inside she doubted whether this was the right role for her.

“I had begun questioning ‘am I growing as a person, is this what I want to do?’”