King's Lynn Queen Elizabeth Hospital visit by NHS national director Professor Stephen Powis

'The Ward Round: Modernising our Hospital' - by Alice Webster, acting CEO of QEH

We remain extremely busy across the hospital, as our committed staff push on to give patients the best possible care. We are working hard to further improve flow in all areas and doing all we can to treat our patients as quickly and safely as possible.

You can help us by calling NHS 111 or accessing it online at www.111.nhs.uk if you need care and don’t have life-threatening symptoms. They will help you find the best place and option for treatment based on your symptoms.

Unfortunately, we still have no news to bring on a new hospital – we continue to work with our colleagues in the national New Hospital Programme team to discuss our case. We hope to be able to bring you positive news in the near future. Our case is extremely strong and demonstrates we can deliver a new hospital by 2030.

Earlier this month we had the honour of welcoming the NHS England national medical director, Professor Stephen Powis, to see our Urgent and Emergency Care Programme and latest developments to improve patient care and experience.

He met with colleagues across the Trust and visited key areas within Urgent and Emergency Care and our medical and surgical assessment units. While onsite Stephen also saw first-hand some of the issues the Trust is facing with Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) and heard more about our important failsafe programme. It’s great to see the QEH being recognised at this national level and thank you to Professor Powis and members of TeamQEH for taking the time to facilitate this visit.

Work continues to modernise and safeguard our site. We continue to concentrate on ensuring our refurbished Same Day Emergency Care unit, which allows for patients needing urgent and emergency care to be treated on the same day, offers modern facilities. This unit is another step forward in our improvement journey to providing care for our patients in the right setting as well as reducing pressure on our emergency department and improve ambulance handover times.

Work to maximise the safety of our buildings is ongoing as we install steel and timber support props across the hospital. Earlier this month, our psychology department was moved to a temporary home on the ground floor in area 2, while work on their offices takes place. Work to install failsafes in our main operating theatres is progressing well.

If you drive past the hospital, you may have noticed some changes, including temporary boarded fencing around the Inspire Centre at the top of our site. This is the first step towards demolition of this building, which is affected by RAAC and has a limited lifespan, after our planning application to demolish this building was approved in December 2022. Work to install new modular units on site continues, ready for the relocation of the vaccination centre, nursery and Unison offices currently housed in the centre.

These services remain open while the hoarding work takes place so continue to visit the centre if you need to. Demolition is due to begin at the end of this month.

In the longer-term, this demolition will create space for a new multi-storey car park, for which we continue to work with our colleagues at the borough council to resolve the outstanding queries about our planning application as quickly as possible. The multi-storey car park is a key enabling scheme for our new development and we hope to have an update on this in the coming weeks.

Visit www.qehkl.nhs.uk for the latest developments.