The first virtual edition of Prudential RideLondon – the world’s greatest festival of cycling – will take place on the weekend of 15 and 16 August to celebrate cycling and raise funds for UK charities, including the King George and Queen’s Hospitals Charity.

Our Stroke service has been shortlisted in the 2020 HSJ Patient Safety Awards – in recognition for its transformation from being D rated to the highest possible A rating, benchmarked according to the Sentinel Stroke National Audit.

Dad-of-two Muthucumaru Yasocumaran is enjoying being back home with his family after spending 98 days being treated for Covid-19 at Queen’s Hospital.

Our Lead Chaplain, Rev Phil Wright, has shared his experience of supporting our staff, patients, and their families through the pandemic. Read his honest and heartfelt account below.

We paused our volunteering in March as the country went into lockdown and our hospitals needed to care for increasing numbers of patients with Covid-19. As the number of patients we care for with the virus decreases, we are restarting some services, and although things are still running differently, we are now able to begin welcoming back our volunteers.

All our teams are currently working extremely hard as we, along with the rest of the NHS, tackle Covid-19. That’s why we wanted to give our colleagues the spotlight, as part of our In Conversation With interviews, to share what they’re doing and the impact on them.

This week we spoke to Maria Benedetti, our Lead Midwife for Multi-Ethnic Empowerment, a role she took up in January and the first of its kind in our Trust. It’s there provide better support our BAME pregnant women.

A metal sculpture, featuring the NHS letters full of hearts, is now proudly on display outside our Cardiology Department at King George Hospital. It was made for us by Otis Griffith, an electrical installation teacher at Havering College.

July is sickle cell awareness month, and Debbie Omodele, Children’s Haemoglobinopathy Nurse Specialist, explains the steps we’ve been taking to improve our care for children with sickle cell and thalassaemia disorder, both during Covid-19 and beyond.

Farukh Hussain, Finance Manager and Co-chair of our Ethnic Minority Network (EMN), writes about the work of the network in supporting staff to speak up and make our hospitals better places to work.