Julian Nettel, Chief Executive and Dr Keith Palmer, Chairman

We joined Barts and The London NHS Trust in 2007/08, attracted by the hospitals’ outstanding clinical reputation and commitment to delivering the best possible care to patients.

Bringing excellence to life

The Trust’s mission of ‘bringing excellence to life’ continues, and we are now raising the bar even higher by benchmarking ourselves against international best practice.  In this way, we aim to achieve excellence in everything we do and personal world-class care for our patients.  This year, we have taken major strides towards achieving this vision:   

Creating an academic health sciences centre

We have continued to work with Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, and our other academic partners, to create one of the first academic health sciences centres in the UK. This crucial development will enable us to bring research and teaching much closer to clinical practice and give our patients faster access to groundbreaking new treatments and cures.

Innovation within our academic health sciences centre will be driven by our clinical specialties in a new organisational structure designed to strengthen the coherence with which we meet our tripartite mission to achieve excellence in education, research and clinical practice.  In line with our ambition to be a clinically-led organisation, this new structure is led by clinicians – an innovative new model very different from anything that has existed previously at Barts and The London.

Speeding access to new cures and treatments

Barts and The London excels in translational research and many of our patients already benefit from new cures and treatments through their participation in pioneering clinical trials.  This year, for example, we launched the UK’s first experimental cancer medicine centre to give cancer patients who have not responded to existing drug therapies fast-tracked access to new treatments.

Building Britain’s biggest new hospitals development

Our unprecedented £1 billion investment in Britain’s biggest new hospitals development will enable us to deliver our services in state-of the-art facilities, transforming the environment in which we care for our patients.

The construction made remarkable progress during the year, with the structures almost reaching their full height at both hospitals. The first new buildings at Barts will come into operation in late 2010, while the first phase of the redevelopment at The Royal London will become operational in early 2012. 

Laying the foundations for state-of-the-art patient records

In April 2008, we became the first major teaching hospital in London to go live with the foundation phase of the NHS Care Records Service (CRS). The introduction of this new system is the biggest change in how we have handled patient information for almost 30 years.  The new IT platform will be the basis of state-of-the-art patient records, enabling staff to access and share patient information more efficiently.

Streamlining our services to eliminate waste

This year we embarked on an ambitious service transformation programme, using the ‘lean’ approach to continuous quality improvement pioneered by Toyota.  By removing all non value-added steps from patient care, we will improve the quality of our services, whilst reducing our cost base – a vital prerequisite for realising our ambition to deliver excellence in everything we do.

Creating strategic partnerships to improve care

In the light of the Healthcare for London programme to make health services in the capital better, safer and more accessible, we are reviewing our services in conjunction with our Primary Care Trust (PCT) colleagues to ensure that they complement others across London. 

• Extending our care to the community setting   
  Through partnership working, we share our specialist expertise and resources with other health organisations to provide joint services in the most appropriate settings for our patients, both locally and further afield.
  
  An example from this year is our partnership with Tower Hamlets PCT to develop the pioneering new birth centre staffed by our midwives, which opened in the new £12 million Barkantine Health Centre in the Isle of Dogs. 

• Expanding our role as a specialist regional centre
  At the same time, the imperative to concentrate key specialist and sub specialist services in regional centres allows us to give more people access to our leading specialists and the better clinical outcomes they are able to achieve because of the numbers of patients they see.  For example, our heart attack centre, which serves the two million people of east London, has more than halved the mortality rate of heart attack patients since its launch.   

Welcoming new colleagues to the Trust board

We are delighted to welcome new colleagues to the Trust board - Matthew Hopkins, Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Holden, Director of Finance and Investment, Phil Jones, Director of ICT and Ian Harrison, non executive director.  We would also like to recognise the immense contributions of executive directors, John Goulston and Gail Beer and non executive director Baljit Ubhey, who left Barts and The London during the year.

Dr Keith Palmer, Chairman

Julian Nettel, Chief Executive