As we continue to look at how we manage our elective and emergency work, while continuing to manage Covid-19 over the coming months, our overarching basis for making decisions is infection prevention and control to keep our patients and staff safe. We have therefore made the decision to continue to postpone most routine face to face appointments until the end of June, when this will be reviewed again. This will allow us to develop plans for starting our face to face appointments again, ensuring that when we do, we are following the national guidelines. 

This does not include cancer and urgent appointments. We are continuing to hold telephone clinics where possible, so that our patients do not need to come into our hospitals. We have continued to postpone all routine, planned surgery (including day cases) and are only carrying out the most urgent operations. We are also looking at further rolling out digital face to face appointments.

All of our surgical waiting lists are being prioritised clinically using Royal College guidelines. We are busy ensuring we have Covid-protected surgical capacity to help us to re-start elective services.  

We know how difficult it is at this current time, especially for our end of life patients and their families, which is why we have updated our visitor restrictions, increasing the number of people allowed to visit patients receiving end of life care, from one to two visitors. Please do keep checking our website regularly where we provide updates on all service changes.

Our May Board meeting takes place tomorrow so I thought it would be interesting to share my update with you, looking at the highs and lows of our journey through this Covid-19 pandemic so far.