NHS Tayside COVID Cast 3 April 2020

I'm grant artful I'm the chief executive of NHS Tayside and want to take just few moments of your time to tell you about some of the major achievements we've made already in our response to kuben 19 that coronavirus there are four things I'd like to tell you about the first thing is you will understand that we were trying to create additional bed capacity within our hospitals in order that we could take in those patients requiring to be treated both Karuna buyers what we've been very successful in doing so in only nine days our clinical and managerial teams have essentially created hospital within hospital at 90 Wells 290 bedded unit that will allow us to admit those patients with coronavirus into one part of the hospital and importantly also we have doubled the number of critical care beds we have available across site which again is seen as major step in helping us address that could run virus the second thing want to tell you about is the fact that obviously we still have many patients who require admission to hospital for reasons other than coronavirus people who have been involved in emergency situations require emergency surgery or indeed are cancer patients and as result we created business-critical team who have been working to ensure that those facilities are available for those patients am very pleased to let you know that those arrangements have been particularly successful NHS Tayside remains the best performing healthcare system in the UK in delivering emergency care and by that mean our performance against the four out of target for patients to be either admitted or discharged from hospital has been the best performance anywhere across the UK that is testament to the very hard work of all our staff and particularly those dealing with emergency admission the third thing I'd like to tell you about on our community assessment homes these are facilities we have created in localities across the Teesside area in order that GPS and khaalis can assist patients who are presenting with symptoms of Koval 19 the coronavirus but don't require to come to hospital this has been major achievement and has been testament to the great working between GPS the health and social care teams and also hospital staff we created facilities at Perth royal infirmary in for fir in Montrose in our growth and at Kings Cross Hospital in Dundee so again hope patients relatives people in the communities and our staff all appreciate our commitment to try to provide services as locally as possible in these challenging times the first thing wanted to tell you about was the fact that NHS Tayside Britain police staff testing which are like staff and their close family contacts to have the test for the coronavirus we understand that we were the first health board in Scotland and indeed the UK to do that and we wanted to reassure our staff and protect them but also to protect our patients by the end of March we had seen over 1,000 members of staff and their close relatives through that service and through doing that and identifying those that were negative over 500 members of staff were able to return to frontline duties now it's fantastically helped it reassures the staff and their families but also importantly for our patients it means that valuable stop with only of training are back in the frontline helping us deal with the patients who are going to come in requiring our care as result am absolutely delighted that we managed to put this arrangement in place and it is testament to the hard work of huge number of staff in many different fields working together to make that possible I'm sure everybody listening this message will recognise with the size and importance of that scale task finally would just like to reiterate my thanks to the public of any chesty side area to all the people working in all of the support agencies in councils in social work in home visiting and all of those working in hospital services this is an immense challenge for us all but we are all working together and the people of site have responded in kind by ensuring the early presenting at hospitals and our other services when they really believe there is the need that is great effort on their part and please would you keep doing up for us our message remains stay home protect the NHS save lives and working together with you and all our staff am sure we will rise to what is clearly one of the most difficult challenges the UK Scotland tea site has ever faced you