Dear colleague,

The hard work of our A&E team at King George Hospital to reduce ambulance handovers has been recognised by NHS Providers.

Colleagues have been working closely with the London Ambulance Service, managing to lessen the time by 27 minutes over the last year.

Between August and December 2022, we saw an increase in handovers taking over an hour, peaking at 38 per cent and well above the national average. Since July 2023, delays of over an hour dropped sharply, most recently accounting for less than one per cent of all handovers – against a national average of 13 per cent (October 2023).

This improvement is despite the number of patient handovers at the hospital increasing from an average of 35 daily in April 2023 to 43 that November, excluding priority calls.

It’s had a significant improvement on the experience and care of our patients arriving from ambulance and those in the community, who as a result, can get quicker access to emergency care with paramedics getting back on the road quicker.

This is a credit to the great effort between our team and the London Ambulance Service and shows just what we can achieve when we work closely together.

Our new Chief Financial Officer

Last week, we announced Mike Gilham as our new Chief Financial Officer.

It’s fantastic to see someone from a local school who started here on work experience make it into this Board level role. Mike is a great appointment and we’re delighted to have him on the executive team.

He will now drive forward our work to improve the quality of care at BHRUT, exit financial special measures, and cut waste in our hospitals so we can invest more in services.

Mike will be taking over from Nick Swift, who after six years at our Trust, is leaving to go and travel the world.

Tackling violence and aggression

No one should have to suffer being shouted at, hit, or subjected to racist abuse while doing their job. Across our Trust, incidents of violence and aggression towards our staff is increasing and is getting worse.

On Monday, we’re launching a hard-hitting campaign: No Abuse, No Excuse – to better protect our staff and raise awareness of what is happening.

Across our sites, website and social media accounts, you’ll see posters sharing the experiences of some of colleagues who have been subjected to unacceptable incidents.

We’ve also launched a new policy to make it more straight forward for staff to ban abusive patients and visitors from our hospitals and making it visible on their patient record.

The use of body cameras is being rolled out to more departments across both sites for that extra level of protection and deter this sort of behaviour. Sadly, it’s a reality of the world we’re living in at the moment.

Best wishes,

Matthew Trainer

Chief Executive