Colleagues have come together to form a new group, the Digestive Diseases Centre, to improve patient care. As part of a joint away day, our Gastroenterology, Endoscopy, General Surgery, Divisional Triumvirate and Executive teams launched the group.

The day was an opportunity for colleagues from a range of different departments in our Trust to come together and think about how we can make our services more efficient, improve communication, and ultimately deliver even better care for our patients.

It featured colleagues from other hospitals presenting on innovative treatments including Mr Charles Evans, consultant colorectal surgeon who discussed his experience of offering robotic surgery in Coventry and Dr Azhar Ansari, consultant gastroenterologist at Surrey and Sussex NHS Trust who talked about the vision for treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) with the aid of technology. Dr Noriko Suzuki, a consultant from St Mark’s Hospital, discussed developments in endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) which involves using telescopes to remove small cancers and therefore treating patients as outpatients, rather than needing more invasive surgery.

The group then looked at making our services more efficient, firstly reflecting on how we can work with our healthcare partners in north east London as part of an integrated care system. There were also discussions about how we can develop our training and research.

Dr Sas Banerjee, consultant colorectal and general surgeon at our Trust commented on how positive everyone felt about the future: ‘the team realised that they were the key to finding solutions to improve our services for patients. The day was particularly successful because the group was multidisciplinary, so colleagues in lots of different roles were working together’.

The team is really excited for the future of the Digestive Diseases Centre, and is confident that, spurred on by the away day, there are some real improvements that can be made to deliver even better care for our patients. Talking about the team’s ambitions, Sas added that their ultimate goal is to ‘become a centre of excellence in north east London for digestive diseases’.

Special thanks to our charity who sponsored the event!