News and events

Read the lastest statement, on behalf of our Trust and local healthcare partners, regarding King George Hospital.

Our intensive care consultant Edmond Smithers has been at our Trust for 20 years. He became a doctor as it took less years to train for that than to be an architect, although his earliest dream was to be an astronaut!

He’s happily married to Dutch wife Karin, despite the fact they married in her Netherlands homeland in a stately home called Huis de Voorst (pronounced house divorced!)

And when he’s not caring for our patients he’s doing his other job, being a part-time taxi driver for his two children.

Local hairdresser Jaye North, 31, is holding a black tie ball on Saturday 6 April to raise money for the King George and Queen’s Hospitals Charity.

Our nursing associate Alina Stevens was named Patient Advocate of the Year in the Patient Experience Network National Awards, held in Birmingham on Wednesday 20 March.

In a special edition of In Conversation With, we spoke to Pat Becker, who isn’t a member of staff at our Trust - she’s a champion of our pain management programme, run by our chronic pain service, after it transformed her life!

The 80-year-old grandmother of five and soon to be great-grandmother of six, first began to experience back pain when she was just 16 following a motorbike accident on her first date with her husband-to-be.

She hasn’t let her pain get in the way of holding down a job over the years, spending a few years working in a gun factory before taking on a more sedate role in a newsagent where she stayed for almost three decades!

Diane Webber has been a nurse in our Trust for 50 years, and what’s kept her doing the job she loves for so long is the people – our patients and staff!

She’s so passionate about what she does that she inspired her son Simon to follow her into nursing.

She recently helped organise a reunion of 13 nurses who all started their training together at Oldchurch Hospital in 1969. They reminisced over how things have changed over the last five decades in the NHS – and how they would sneak in through the window of their nurses’ quarters if coming back after curfew!

“It was the best experience of my career so far,” is Alexia Young’s take on her educational trip to Cambodia, where she and colleagues taught Cambodian healthcare workers how to help patients with tracheostomies including how to manage swallowing difficulties.

Two dedicated colleagues at our Trust are getting on their running shoes to take part in different upcoming marathons.

Maisie may only be 23, but she has worked for our Trust for five years, working her way up from pharmacy assistant to pharmacy technician. She was amazed at the opportunities offered here, joining us from McDonald’s, where she once thought she may be stuck forever!

Despite loving her job at our Trust much more than at the golden arches, she is grateful for everything her former employer taught her as in her own words, ‘in both roles I am assembling an order, whether food or medicine.’ She credits her experience there for equipping her to deal with a busy and high pressured environment.

She’s also been recognised for her hard work by being named Pharmacy Professional of the Month for her quick thinking when she spotted that a patient was on double the dose of lithium than she should have been.