It has been a challenging year for everyone in the NHS but we as the subsidiary for North Tees and Hartlepool Trust have given our all to support our clinical colleagues as well as the local community. Throughout the first wave of admissions during the Covid-19 pandemic we concentrated on the provision and maintenance of high-quality PPE to keep our staff and patients safe, with our success bringing Health Secretary at the time, Matt Hancock up to North Tees to see how we’d achieved such excellent outcomes.
In addition to our PPE solution, we took decisive and challenging action to respond to the pandemic. We doubled the size of our oxygen infrastructure on the North Tees site to ensure there’d be no shortage. We redesigned our emergency department to have a one-door entrance to reduce the risk of infection between patients. This was a daunting task in practical terms but our teams were able to deliver this change in an astounding 12 weeks! Finally, we built the rainbow rooms as respite areas for our people, many of whom were facing the most challenging time of their careers and whose endurance throughout the pandemic was humbling to witness.
We recognised early on in the pandemic that the virus needed to be fought in local community settings as well as our hospitals. That is why we developed “Cleaning the NHS Way”, a training course designed to bring anyone up to the NHS Standard of cleaning in a short space of time. This course, approved by the Royal Society of Public Health, is the first UK accredited cleaning course issued by a public sector body, and we took it into schools, care homes and police stations not just locally, but to communities right across the UK where it continues to receive overwhelmingly positive feedback. Our aim was and still is to elevate the standard of domestic cleaning in public spaces across England, and consequently help reduce the number of hospital admissions, not just from Covid-19 but from all bacterial and viral diseases.
The challenge is far from over, and as we head into what is likely to be a difficult Winter, we are proud to support both our Trust and our communities in supporting cleanliness and wellbeing. With all primary care now being asked to comply with the updated National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness, and with sustainability at the forefront of the global conversation, we are committed to remaining at the front line of support and innovation in helping everyone meet and overcome these challenges.
North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust have created the below video highlighting some of the successes from our new and improved urgent and emergency care hub to our ambitious plans for a greener future.
