Dear colleague,

Our Ageing Well Centre team started the week by celebrating the opening of the new centre and welcoming their first patient 78-year-old Terry from Dagenham.

Terry said: “It was good, quick and it’s a nice new building. Staff were great as they always are. I liked that it was a lot less hectic than Queen’s as I’ve been there quite a lot in the last few months, I was happy with how it went.”

As Terry mentioned, it is a better and much calmer environment and once fully up and running, will mean patients won’t always have to visit our A&Es and our hospitals, which will in turn also reduce the pressure in these environments.

Through a more proactive approach, our teams will be able to diagnose conditions earlier improving the health outcomes of patients.

The opening of the centre is a great achievement by all involved and is the latest service to open at the new St George’s Health and Wellbeing Hub, in Havering. In the coming weeks, we’re going to open our new Community Diagnostic Centre there increasing tests and scans by more than 30,000 a year.

Apprenticeship success

Congratulations to our apprenticeship team and our apprentices for becoming the first NHS trust in the country to have achieved The 5% Club’s gold standard, putting us among organisations such as Coca-Cola.

Last year, we proudly became 5% Club members when 5% of our workforce signed up to an apprenticeship.

The achievement comes off the back of us becoming a main provider, meaning we’re now able to deliver fully accredited apprenticeship programmes in-house and for other organisations, instead of external providers delivering the training.

Our apprenticeship success highlights how we’re investing in our workforce and supporting local people so they can develop, grow and thrive at our Trust, whilst also improving patient care and staff experience.

It is just one of the ways we’ve been improving across the Trust, which has recently been recognised by local MPs Wes Streeting and Andrew Rosindell.

Matthew Trainer
Chief Executive