Royal Surrey celebrates its first year as a NHS Foundation Trust

Today marks the 1^st birthday of Royal Surrey achieving NHS Foundation Trust Status. It has been a significant year for the Trust.

Royal Surrey was named as one of the best healthcare employers in the country, with a placing in the Health Service Journal’s Healthcare 100 list. We have also been named as one of the top six performers in the country for orthopaedic treatment and outcomes in the Dr Foster Hospital Guide 2010.

A Patients First project, Emergency Medical Admissions Pathway Redesign (EMAP), was a finalist in the South East Best of Health Awards.  The EMAP and another Patient’s First Project, the Creating Capability for Continuous Improvement Programme (c3i), were also short listed for Prestigious Health Service Journal Awards.

EMAP has worked closely with local services to reduce the length of stay of emergency patients. In just a year, the average length of stay for emergency medical patients has been reduced from 20% above to 5% below national average. As emergency medical patients typically occupy over 60% bed space, this substantial reduction in length of stay released over 11,000 bed days. This has created savings of over £1 million for the Hospital.

The c3i initiative, which uses a process improvement methodology tailored to heath settings, focuses on giving staff the tools to improve the quality of service, patient experience and productivity. Over the 12 month period, c3i has trained over 100 staff, and delivered over 100 improvement projects. These c3i projects have yielded savings between £1 million, for major improvement projects, and £10K, for smaller individual projects. C3i has also been credited with making real changes to staff behaviour and has improved staff motivation. 

More than 300,000 patients have attended our outpatients department, which is around 1,100 a day, and Radiology have completed almost 170,000 examinations.  Just over 20,000 operations have been carried out and 3,300 babies have started their life at the Royal Surrey. 

The new Elective Surgical Unit and the expanded Medical Assessment Unit have opened their doors and are already having an impact on reducing the number of patients requiring inpatient beds and have improved patient experience.

The £3million pathology unit expansion on the Lavis Suite is almost complete and will enable cytology and histology to deliver more and will particularly benefit our cancer patients. 

Following our licensing on 1 December 2009, Royal Surrey has successfully established our first ever Council of Governors and a sub committee—Nominations Committee—has just appointed the Trust’s new Chairman Peter Dunt.  

We also very grateful to the level of support we have had from staff, patients and the local community. We now have nearly 14500 Foundation Trust members. This is an extremely positive response, and we would like to thank all our members for taking the time to get involved in the Trust. We hope to continue to grow our Trust community and are always looking to welcome new members.