Dear colleague,

March was our busiest month on record with more than 30,000 patients coming through our A&Es and urgent treatment centres.

Despite this, our teams worked incredibly hard and when our performance for the month is published next week by NHS England it will show that we have continued to make progress.

It’s a real credit to our colleagues and partners, who we have been working closely with, as more patients are getting the care they need, when they need it with waiting times continuing to drop.

We still have more work to do as some patients are still waiting too long. We know that elderly people waiting for a bed are most likely to spend a very long time in the emergency department, and while it’s good to see our overall performance improve, we won’t be happy until we have made serious inroads into these long waits for beds.

They will be helped at King George Hospital by the opening of our new Same Day Emergency Care department that will soon see its first patients. And we’ve begun preliminary discussions about securing the £35m we need to redesign and rebuild the emergency department at Queen’s Hospital. The A&E at Queen’s was built for 300 people a day. In March, the average daily attendance was more than 600.

Anna’s message

A story that brought a smile to my face this week involved Anna Page, one of our senior nurses.

Anna jumped into action and gave CPR to Iris, a great-grandmother-of-four, after seeing her having a cardiac arrest on a street in Romford.

Anna’s prompt actions saved Iris’s life and she’s now out of hospital and continuing her recovery at home.

Anna has used the experience to encourage everyone to get basic life support training so they could help save a life if the situation arose.

Violence and aggression work continues

When you visit our hospitals you will notice the striking posters and banners that form part of our campaign to reduce violence and aggression at our Trust.

Our message is simple – No Abuse No Excuse – and this week we have made further progress after introducing de-escalation and breakaway training for staff in patient-facing roles.

It will help those colleagues who don’t feel safe or confident doing aspects of their work because of a fear of being assaulted.

We’ve also updated our guidelines to better protect staff and make it more straightforward for a colleague to ‘red card’/ban an abusive patient or relative from our hospitals when it is clinically safe to do so.

I hope you have a great weekend.

Matthew Trainer

Chief Executive