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Gavin Boyle is Chief Executive of University Hospitals Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust
“Working in the NHS is a huge privilege; there are few walks of life where it is possible to make such a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s an institution I love and which I think distinguishes us as a nation and as a civilised society. I also believe that we have a responsibility to safeguard it for future generations.
My priorities are delivering the best possible patient care, enabling our people to play their part, working in partnership and being sustainable in improving the care for our community.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading my regular blog and finding out more about the work of the Trust.
Thanks to your efforts, we’ve seen a significant drop in the number of Covid-19 positive inpatients at our hospitals over the past seven to 10 days. During that time, we’ve also discharged our 2,000th Covid-19 patient home or to their next place of care since the start of the pandemic. This is such good news.
Regular blog readers will know I try to take a balanced view of the world and can see the positive side of most things. But one event this week has beaten me and left me feeling pretty annoyed a couple of days on. We had some ‘Covid-19 denying’ protesters wielding megaphones at the entrance of Royal Derby Hospital on Wednesday intimidating the public and our staff. It’s unfathomable why people would do this. How insensitive to stand shouting conspiracy theories in a place where 48 hours earlier many of us were stood in silence to remember an NHS colleague who had died of the virus.
Today is another difficult day for the UHDB family, with the loss of Dr Krishnan Subramanian. You will have seen the message from myself and our Chair Kathy McLean, while Dr Magnus Harrison, our Executive Medical Director, has also led the tributes today. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our Anaesthetics and Theatres teams, who I know will be hurting today.
Again this week, we’ve seen a further rise in the number of patients in our hospitals with Covid-19. We’ve passed the 200 mark, which is still just below the number we saw at the peak of the first wave but is continuing to rise. We’ve also seen an increasing number of patients requiring treatment in our ICUs at both Queen’s and Royal Derby.
Yesterday it was announced that both Derbyshire and Staffordshire are moving to Tier 2 from midnight on Saturday. This means changes for the communities we serve, with no guests to be invited into homes and the ‘rule of six’ applying outside.
