Dear colleague,

There has been plenty of Christmas cheer and celebrations across our hospitals this week with a number of special visits including our neighbours at West Ham FC. It’s been great seeing patients and staff get into the festive spirit.

As 2025 approaches, it’s a good time to reflect on the achievements we’ve made across our Trust in the past year.

We left special measures after a decade; we were the most improved trust in England for A&E performance; and we opened two new theatres at King George Hospital.

We’re also diagnosing patients quicker through our two new Community Diagnostic Centres at Barking Community Hospital and St George’s Health and Wellbeing Hub, whilst our elderly patients are starting to be cared for in a much better environment in our new Ageing Well Centre, located at the Hub.

It was motivating to our staff to see that our improvements were recognised by Health Secretary Wes Streeting on his recent trips to our sites and in his speech to NHS Providers. I’d like to echo his sentiments and thank our staff for their hard work.

We are going into 2025 with Professor Andrew Deaner as our new Chief Medical Officer, and Nic Kane as our new Chief Nurse.

Andrew was born at the old Ilford Maternity Hospital that became part of King George Hospital (KGH) and he is the third of our Executives to have grown up in the boroughs we serve. 

We’re looking forward to welcoming Nic who brings a wealth of experience to our Trust when she takes over from Kathryn Halford who is retiring next year.

Both Andrew and Nic, along with the rest of our teams, will be leading us through a challenging winter and to help support this work, we will be focusing on securing the £35million needed to redesign our A&E at Queen’s to end corridor care.

I’d like to wish you and your families a very happy Christmas and all the best for the New Year.

Best wishes,

Matthew Trainer

Chief Executive