Happy New Year from everyone at the Trust!

And just like that – we’re into 2023! Though the festive period was a time for many to relax and spend time with family and friends, our amazing teams continued to work throughout Christmas and New Year. Many shared photos on the day, celebrating with colleagues while working hard to provide the very best care to our patients. 

In 2022, we saw record-breaking attendances across all our departments and treated an incredible 840,000 patients. This is almost double the numbers we saw five years ago, and only possible thanks to the care and commitment shown by our teams.

On behalf of everyone at the Trust, we would like to thank our patients, visitors and members of the local communities for your continued support and wish you all a very Happy New Year!

Visit from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care

The ‘amazing’ work of staff was praised by Steve Barclay, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, during a visit to Maidstone Hospital on Thursday 5 January. Mr Barclay heard about the innovative ways of working at our hospitals which support the Trust across emergency, surgery and cancer care, ensuring we deliver some of the fastest patient care in the country.

Mr Barclay’s visit included our busy Emergency Department, which cares for around 300 people each day, as well as our Care Coordination Centre. The Centre uses real time data to constantly monitor the Trust’s 700 beds to improve the movement of patients through our hospitals.

During his visit, Mr Barclay sat down with clinical staff from across Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells hospitals and discussed our successful Community Diagnostic Centre in Maidstone which opened in 2021 and delivered 12,000 MRI and CT scans in just six-months. He also learnt more about the development of the Kent and Medway Orthopaedic Centre. Once completed next year, this new theatre complex at Maidstone Hospital will increase surgical capacity across Kent and Medway and reduce the number of patients waiting for an orthopaedic operation.

The Secretary of State said: “The team at the Trust have done an amazing job. You get a real sense when walking around this Trust of just how much has been achieved and the impact this makes on patient care.”

Second state-of-the-art radiotherapy machine treats first patients

We are delighted to announce the Trust now has a second Halcyon radiotherapy machine providing treatment for patients at the Maidstone site of our Kent Oncology Centre.

Only a small number of cancer treatment centres in England are using this new radiotherapy technology which halves treatment times and provides a much more comfortable experience for patients.

The £2 million Halcyon accelerator targets larger tumours more effectively and provides more accurate images in a quieter and less enclosed environment, helping to reduce the stress a patient may feel.

The latest Halcyon follows the first machine which arrived last summer, helping to take our care for oncology patients to the next level.

We've taken over the BBC airwaves again!

After featuring on Radio 4's national nightly PM news programme in October, our teams took centre stage again last month, when BBC Radio Kent presented a four-hour live broadcast from Maidstone Hospital.

Highlighting the Trust’s work to care for record numbers of attendances, improve the flow of patients across our hospitals and plan for winter, presenter Steve Ladner spoke to colleagues from a number of services including our Emergency Departments, Cancer and Diagnostics, Catering, and the Care Coordination Centre. 

Saying thank you to our fantastic volunteers

Our volunteers make a real difference to our patients and also provide vital support to our staff in a number of ways. If you have visited our hospitals, you may have been greeted by a volunteer when you arrived, or seen them helping us to look after our open spaces and gardens. Our volunteers play an important role in the smooth running of our Trust, from accompanying patients to the correct places for appointments to helping medical staff by taking samples to our labs. As a thank you for all their hard work and dedication, we hosted a volunteer Christmas lunch in December. During the event, we presented Long Service Awards to those people who have been generously giving their time to us over a number of years. The celebrations included speeches from Chief Executive Miles Scott, Medical Director Dr Peter Maskell and Chief Nurse Jo Haworth.

Did you know?

As we welcome in 2023, we have been looking back at all that we have achieved over the past year. Did you know that in 2022, we saw a record 200,000 patients in our emergency departments and cared for 2,000 people with COVID-19? Our brilliant maternity teams welcomed over 5,600 babies into the world and our children's services paediatric teams cared for over 14,000 young patients. We also opened our dedicated Children's Emergency Department at Tunbridge Wells Hospital.

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