Hello and welcome to H1, named after our new hospital bus route - a briefing designed to make sure that you and your colleagues are kept up to date with the latest news and activities at Epsom and St Helier.
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A welcome from Chief Executive Daniel Elkeles
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This month we welcome the Care Quality inspectors in an announced inspection on Wednesday 1 May. A senior team of 25 inspectors (including Kathryn Henderson, the first female President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine) arrived on Wednesday morning to inspect A&E and maternity services at both Epsom and St Helier hospitals, as well as Medicine at Epsom and Surgery at St Helier. Their report will be published in August and early feedback from the inspectors highlighted positive changes in maternity and the caring nature of our staff.
With the continued development of the Improving Healthcare Together programme, which is led by experienced GPs from NHS Surrey Downs, Sutton and Merton Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), there are many views being expressed. Whilst we welcome everyone's ideas and comments it is vital that we ensure all of the facts are made clear as many of us have spent the last four years listening to the 'fake news' and misinformation about both of our hospitals. I thought I should tell you the facts about what is happening to improve Epsom Hospital in this edition.
I hope you find the information useful and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me by email on
daniel.elkeles@nhs.net if you have any questions.
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Epsom Hospital - what's really happening
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1. There are no plans to close Epsom Hospital now or in the future, whatever happens.
2. We are investing over £30m in improving it between 2018-2020.
3. We sold land on Epsom Hospital site last year to the highest credible bidder - all the proceeds are being invested in improving Epsom Hospital. There were higher bidders but these bids did not enable us to meet on the commitment we made to social care and were not workable because they were for exclusive high end residential blocks of flats that had significant planning risks that we were asked to take responsibility for.
4. We need a new 500 bed hospital building to treat Epsom and St Helier's sickest 15% of patients. It will save lives. It will cost £500m. It will be at Epsom, St Helier or Sutton hospitals. Our commissioners hope to consult the public on the preferred location in the Autumn.
5. Wherever the new hospital building is built, Epsom Hospital will remain open treating at least 85% of the patients it does today.
6. We have more staff, are safer, and provide more services than we ever have.
Investing £30m+ in Epsom Hospital
Already completed:
- New paediatric and maternity outpatients (2018)
- Expanded A&E department (opened December 2018)
- New therapy centre (opened February 2019)
Coming soon:
- New outpatient department (opening June 2019)
- New clinical administration building (opening June 2019)
- Replacing lifts, windows, floors (ongoing - 2019)
- Replacing steam powered boilers (ongoing 2019-2020)
- Repairing the exterior of Wells Wing (2019)
- New deck car park (2020)
- Extending Langley Wing to bring new Epsom and Ewell Community Hospital on site in 2021
Everything we are investing in will be used by the residents of Epsom and surrounding areas for decades to come.
If you would like to read more about this and share our leaflet with colleagues, please click here.
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H1 - our hospital shuttle bus service - allowing local people and patients to ride
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H1 is our hospital's staff shuttle bus service, which currently runs between sites is now allowing local people and patients to ride. We have decided to open this service up in order to allow our patients and members of the public an easy way to move between our hospital sites - travel can be a huge part of a patient's journey. We hope that by making this service available to them, we will be improving the experience of our patients.
Staff will still be able to ride for free with their Trust ID and a charge of £1.50 per journey will be required from non-staff (which can be paid by either cash or contactless card, but not oyster). Children are half price per journey. There is only one request stop on the route and which is by the Tesco Superstore on the 217 at Cheam.
The shuttle leaves every 45 minutes. The timetable can be found on the
Trust website.
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New Renal Haemodialysis unit at St Helier opens
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Some of the Renal haemodialysis team
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After months of hard work and a £3 million investment, the Trust's new Renal Haemodialysis Department officially opened its doors to patients this month.
Located right at the heart of St Helier, the new unit is much bigger and brighter than the old unit and is stocked full of state-of-the-art equipment. It comes with 28 haemodialysis stations (complete with individual flat screen TVs so patients can keep entertained while receiving care), and offers a number of individual dialysis rooms, which will help to keep infections to a minimum and provide additional privacy should patients need it.
Did you know - Epsom and St Helier runs the largest nephrology service in the country outside the renal transplant centres.
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Cancer care goes from strength to strength
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Over the course of the last financial year, the Trust achieved all of the cancer waiting time standards - including seeing patients with suspected cancer within two weeks of referral; providing first treatment within 31 days after diagnosis; and ensuring that patients receive treatment with 62 days from the moment they are referred by a GP. This is a really strong performance, and makes a very real difference to patients and their worried loved ones.
In addition, the National Lung Cancer Audit, which was published in May, also shows a strong performance nationally. Importantly, it shows that our cancer nurse specialists are seeing patients in a timely way (above the national average) and were above the national average for curative care (that's treatment provided when a cure or prolonged life is a possible), as we provided curative care to 85.7% of patients with confirmed lung cancer, compared to the national average of 80.8%.
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From 1 April we became partners in both Sutton Health and Care and Surrey Downs Health and Care
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Sutton Health and Care is a partnership made up of the GP federation in Sutton, Sutton Council, South West London and St George's Mental Health Trust and Epsom and St Helier hospitals. Together we are responsible for community services in Sutton, caring for adults in their own homes across the borough, providing universal and specialist children's services, and sexual health services.
 Surrey Downs Health and Care is a partnership between the three GP federations that operate in the Surrey Downs areas (GP Health Partners in the Epsom, Leatherhead and Ewell area, Dorking Healthcare and Surrey Medical Network in the East Elmbridge area), CSH Surrey and Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust. As local NHS organisations we are working closely with Surrey Council County to provide adult community health services in Surrey Downs (that's the Epsom, Dorking and East Elmbridge areas).
These pioneering partnerships are truly exciting as together we can achieve more for the people we care for. Bringing together our expertise will improve patient care and will enable local people to access the right support, care and treatment more easily than ever before.
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Recognising our staff who go the extra mile
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Nurses' and Midwives' Day
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Celebrating our nurses
This month we marked Nurses' and Midwives' Day with a really special event that was jam packed with inspirational speakers, our annual nursing and midwifery awards ceremony, a surprise Zumba session and even a bake off competition!
It was a real celebration of the commitment, hard work and compassion that our nursing and midwife workforce give to our organisation and our patients, and all things nursing absolutely took centre stage. We were joined by the Regional Chief Nurse Oliver Shanley, Capital Nurse Deputy Programme Director Selina Trueman, our nursing associates, Regional Maternity Lead for London and Programme Lead Capital Midwife Jess Read, Queen's Nursing Institute Sue Boran, Dr Amit Patel (and his guide dog Kika), as well as our very own Stuart Jones from the Complaints Team, who told us about the experience the Jones family had when their young son became one of our patients. It was a truly touching day, and celebrated the amazing contribution our nurses making Epsom and St Helier a truly caring organisation.
Gold badge and ESTH Heroes
Each month we celebrate staff who have gone above and beyond in our Patient Gold Badge and Heroes Awards. May saw recorder number of staff receiving a Patient First Gold Badge award (given to staff who have been singled out for praise by patients and visitors) and a bumper crop of ESTH Hero awards, which are given to staff nominated by a fellow colleague for going above and beyond.
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Security officers, George Awuah and Nana Jenkins
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Reading the nominations for staff is a really humbling thing to do, and I've heard some amazing examples of fantastic care, life-saving judgement calls and staff who make a difference every day. This included two of our security team who used their skills managed to apprehend someone who was trying to steal from the hospital and even tried to run the two members of the team over. Our two staff members did a fantastic job in preventing this incident occurring and a break-in.
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