We are one of the largest acute trusts in England, with a predicted turnover of more than £600 million. We employ 8,584 staff and have more than 1,000 beds.
Our Trust was formed in 1999 when three hospital trusts covering Thanet, Canterbury, Ashford, Swale, Shepway and Dover merged.
A major reconfiguration of hospital services followed and we now have five hospitals serving a population of 695,000 people in east Kent and over a million through our regional services.
The William Harvey Hospital in Ashford has the full range of district general hospital services. It is also the Primary PCI centre treating heart attacks for the whole of Kent and Medway and the trauma unit for east Kent.
The Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate, also provides district general hospital services and gynae-oncology, while Kent & Canterbury Hospital in Canterbury is a specialist services hub which provides inpatient renal, urology and vascular services, as well as robotic surgery.
Our new hospital in Dover, Buckland Hospital, and Royal Victoria Hospital, Folkestone, provide a variety of outpatient, diagnostic and minor injury services, alongside a range of services throughout the local area.
We also provide a number of services in the local community, including in people’s own homes, this includes home births, home dialysis, community paediatrics, mobile chemotherapy and stoma care.
We provide some of our services to communities outside of east Kent, including some treatments and rehabilitation only previously offered in London.
Our Vision
As one of the largest acute trusts in England and biggest employers in the south east, East Kent Hospitals has a vitally important role in improving the health and wellbeing of our local community.
Our vision is to be a leading provider of acute hospital services by delivering ‘Great Healthcare from Great People‘.
We have a national and international reputation for delivering high-quality specialist care, particularly in kidney treatment, robotic urology surgery, orthodontics and endoscopy. Our award-winning approach to research and innovation has been recognised as making an outstanding contribution to the world of clinical research.
We have many nationally recognised, award-winning staff; neuro-rehabilitation research is world- class and we are one of only five urology robotic surgery training centres in England. Our Primary PCI service, for the whole of Kent and Medway, has treated more than 5,000 patients and treats more patients each year than centres such as Guys & St Thomas’s and Kings College Hospital in London.
The South East London, Kent and Medway Trauma Network is the country’s best performing trauma network and our hospitals have the best patient outcomes in the network.
We prize training doctors, nurses and other health professionals and we already work closely with local universities and King’s College, University of London. We now have the exciting new opportunity of working with Kent and Medway’s new Medical School, jointly provided by the University of Kent and Canterbury Christchurch University, which opens in September 2020. We will continue to build our relationships with the local universities for nursing, education and research.
Our Future
We are committed to continually improving the quality of patient care and the CQC have praised the dedication and caring nature of the Trust’s staff. There is more work to do to embed improvements in patient care and experience and manage pressure on the Trust’s services, not least of which is the impact of the pandemic. Working with our patients and staff, developing integrated pathways of care and building enduring relationships with our partners is vital to continue to drive the changes we are making.
Our long-term strategy is clinically-led and involves a major reconfiguration of hospital services. It has been designed to transform secondary care in east Kent to deliver outstanding standards across all specialities which build services around the characteristics of our patients and a commitment to refreshing our estate and facilities. We have challenges ahead of us to make that a reality in the fast moving and changing times that we are living in. The Trust’s Maternity Services are under review by regulators, which brings additional pressures and an imperative to develop and improve services. We need a strong and well balanced Board to successfully lead the organisation into the future and make delivering outstanding care across our whole community a reality.
Trust Priorities
Getting to good
We want care for our patients to be as good as we can make it. By continuously improving, measured by the CQC’s core domains, we want our next CQC rating to be‘Good’, and then to build on this to become“Outstanding”.
Higher standards for patients
We want to improve the quality of patient care and patients’ experience by ensuring that everyone gets seen and treated in a timely way. This means meeting national waiting time targets and using clinical best practice, so that we deliver the best patient care every time.
A great place to work
We want to continue to develop a positive and caring culture for staff as well as patients. Developing, keeping and attracting a great workforce is how we will deliver our vision of ‘great healthcare, from great people’.
Delivering our future
Our vision is for East Kent Hospitals to be a centre of excellence: where specialist teams have the equipment and staffing they need to provide excellent patient care; where people can get specialist intensive rehabilitation and outstanding elective care and where people can get fast access to hospital treatment.
Right skills, right time, right place
To deliver great healthcare from great people we need to have teams with the right skills, delivering care to patients at the right time, in the right place. This includes providing more services seven days a week, transforming our teams and how we work, and delivering new models of care.
Healthy finances
Providing patient care that is more effective keeps people healthier for longer and is more cost-effective too. This means we can make the most of the fantastic advances in modern medicine and make the money go further.