I hope this finds you well

You may have seen that some of our staff held a peaceful protest outside Queen’s Hospital on Friday, which I acknowledged in my latest video diary, to oppose the Government’s decision to introduce mandatory vaccine for healthcare workers.

We appreciate this is a difficult time for some of our staff and we’re continuing to support them, as I’m very keen that all my colleagues are vaccinated.

In particular we’re focusing on one-to-one conversations and this has been very successful in our Emergency Departments (ED) where the number of unvaccinated nurses has fallen from 45 to six.

However, we cannot ignore the current reality that we may well lose staff from 1 April, when all healthcare worked must be double jabbed, and we are planning for this possible outcome.

Over recent weeks, the vaccination has shown that it is having a significant impact and I’m proud of the part we’re playing in rolling it out to our communities. The staff in our hubs have done a great job, some on top of their every day role, like our pharmacist Ramandeep Kaur, who does a shift a month in our hub at King George Hospital, as a way to give back after spending 142 days shielding during the pandemic due to her arthritis.

Thankfully, Covid-19 cases are falling across the country, as well as in our hospitals, and the Government has announced that we will be returning to Plan A from Thursday.

While this is a positive sign that the Omicron variant may have peaked, we will not be changing the current measures we have in place at Queen’s and King George hospitals, which I discussed during my recent interview on Radio 4’s Today programme. We must continue protecting our staff and patients, so face masks will remain mandatory and anyone who enters our hospitals must sanitise their hands.

During the interview I also spoke about how we’ve been dealing with the Omicron variant, while continuing to tackle our waiting lists through creative surgical initiatives, which were also covered in the Sunday Times. Our teams have seized the opportunity for innovation through the pandemic and are turning that into business as usual. We’ve seen the number of patients waiting for more than a year for treatment reduce from 2,430 at the end of March 2021 to 959 by the end of December. We hope to get close to zero by the summer.

Kind regards,

Matthew Trainer
Chief Executive