Weekly Message 17 Feb 12
Friday 17 February 2012 
Dear everyone
This week I was pleased to welcome Henry Smith MP to open our new look mammography service at Crawley Hospital. The service allows Surrey and Sussex patients access to the latest digital technology for breast cancer diagnostic services.
A new mammography machine, costing around £680,000, was purchased last year but could not be installed until major renovation work had been carried out. This renovation included a brand new unit at the hospital to house it. The unit became fully operational in January this year, and is currently taking up to 18 patients per day, five days per week. Every Thursday, the One Stop Clinic at the unit provides 'same day' referral as patients attend clinic, are referred to a consultant and diagnostic searches are carried out. During the rest of the week, the unit deals with pre-booked appointments and follow up appointments.
Recently the DH has published 18 week performance figures for Trusts in England for December. Nationally the target is for 90% of people to be seen within 18 weeks from the time of their referral to treatment (known as referral to treatment time or RTT). For December, our figure was 70.8%. Providing safe, high quality healthcare is a priority for us and that includes seeing patients as quickly as possible. We have been working with our NHS partners to ensure patients are seen much quicker and our latest results for February show an improvement at 83.8%. We must continue to push hard to get to 90% and the opening of our new wards will help with that as it will allow us to ring-fence beds for RTT or non-emergency patients.
I hope as many staff as possible took the opportunity to visit the new wards today. They are very impressive and my thanks go once again to Ian Mackenzie, Shaun Cunningham and Chris Limpus from Estates and Facilities and everyone on the project team for delivering such a high standard of build within such a short timescale. The wards couldn't have come at a better time as this week has been one of the busiest the hospital has known with high numbers of patients coming to the emergency department.
This week the CQC published the results of the national outpatients' survey. Patients were asked a series of questions relating to their experience as an outpatient. It covered areas including 'seeing a doctor', 'tests and treatment', 'hospital and environment' and 'overall impression'. For almost all responses our rating fell within the intermediate 60% of Trusts, which indicates that patients were largely satisfied with the standard of treatment and care they received. Areas that the survey showed a slightly weaker performance included patients knowing what would happen during the appointment and for ensuring that patients knew who to contact about their condition or treatment after leaving hospital. These are clearly areas where we need to improve and will form part of our action plan to improve the outpatient experience for patients. What is particularly pleasing is that we were better than average (i.e. rated in the top 20% of Trusts) for 'staff not talking in front of patients, as if they weren't there'. As you know this is something which last year was a focus of the Dispatches programme and it is encouraging to see this improvement.
Best wishes,
Michael Wilson
