Dear colleague,

This week saw our junior doctors go on strike for 72 hours. Our teams have done a fantastic job to make sure we could run our emergency and inpatient services, but it had a significant impact on planned care. We have had to cancel and rearrange more than 2,000 outpatient appointments and over 200 non-urgent surgeries.

I want to thank colleagues for stepping up; they made a tremendous effort for our patients and for each other. While it’s been a challenging period, we’ve identified opportunities to improve the way we work, that we need to integrate into the day to day running of our hospitals to improve patient care and staff experience.

I have been open in my sympathies for the concerns junior doctors have over their pay and conditions. I hope they can reach a settlement soon and avoid the need for ongoing action.

Healthcare Science Week

This week was also Healthcare Science week, and it was great to hear from Funmi Akinlade, one of our consultant clinical scientists in biochemistry, who has been working hard with her colleagues to raise awareness amongst young scientists around the vast range of careers open to them in the NHS.

As Funmi, who works in our Pathology team supporting clinicians to understand what their patients’ blood results means, put so well: “Healthcare scientists are a huge part of the patient journey and the NHS, playing a role in diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease”.

Today’s event saw the team welcome local science students to Queen’s Hospital to learn about the range of careers, spanning more than 50 branches of healthcare science, including medical physics and engineering and physiological sciences.

It’s a fascinating, and incredibly valuable and rewarding career path - find out more.

Congratulations to Sky A and MRU

I was delighted join Chief Nurse Kathryn Halford and our new site leadership team to award Sky A and our Medical Receiving Unit their silver and bronze ward accreditations.  The programme is part of our ongoing efforts to improve and standardise the quality of patient care and these latest results take the number of silver wards to 11 and bronze wards to 19.

Wards are assessed on patient experience, patient safety, staff experience, and efficiency and are given a report which highlights areas where they are excelling, and improvements needed to progress to the next level.

It’s great for our patients and for the teams, who as you’ll see in the videos, get very excited about their achievements – and rightly so.

Best wishes,

Matthew Trainer

Chief Executive