All change for our surgical wards

As part of the Trust’s continued efforts to take our care from better to best and on to brilliant, the surgical directorate has made some major changes to how the surgical wards are organised at Medway Maritime Hospital. Recent pressures inspired our doctors, nurses and management staff to put their heads together to work out how they could improve patient care in surgery.

Ben Stevens, Director of Clinical Operations for the Co-ordinated Surgical Directorate, explains: “Over the winter our services were under a lot of pressure. We were seeing more and more people coming through our Emergency Department, including a substantial number who needed surgical treatment. We recognised that we needed to manage patients more effectively, changing how we ran our surgical wards to help us provide both an ef cient and high performing A&E and a high quality service for our patients who were coming in for planned operations.”

The team put together an ambitious programme, changing the way that the different surgical wards work individually and together to get the most out of the available resources. The changes have included increasing the number of patients that can be cared for in the Surgical Assessment Unit, creating a new ‘short stay’ acute surgery ward and ringfencing elective orthopaedic surgery beds to ensure that patients with this planned surgery will continue to be treated even during busy periods.

Simone Hay, Deputy Director of Nursing for the directorate, said: “These changes will deliver two big changes to our patients. The rst is extra capacity in the system will mean that we can move people who need urgent surgical care through our A&E more quickly, get treated more quickly and get home more quickly.

“The second is making sure that more of our patients with planned surgeries are seen when we have arranged to see them, with fewer rebookings and delays. These are big improvements that will make a major change to our patients’ experiences.”

The changes have meant that some of our surgical wards are in different places to where they had previously been. Patients and the families will be given details of where they need to go from Trust staff as part of their admission process and in letters from the hospital, but are advised to ask their nurse or hospital doctor if they have any queries.