Royal Papworth Hospital reflects on rising demand five years later
The hospital opened its new site in May 2019
Last updated 6th May 2024
Five years on since it welcomed its first patient, one of Cambridgeshire's leading hospitals is telling us how it's trying to keep patients as safe as possible.
Royal Papworth Hospital opened its doors in May 2019 on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus after moving from its previous site in Papworth village.
It treats around 50,000 patients at the £160m centre.
"Everybody comes to work desperately wanting to treat patients"
Eilish Midlane is the hospital's chief executive - she said moving to the new building has improved the quality of care it delivers to patients, but admitted it's been tough going.
"We have currently got long waiting lists and backlogs as a consequence, not only of the pandemic response, but also the more recent industrial action by a variety of different groups of staff," she said.
"That's very frustrating because everybody here comes to work desperately wanting to treat patients.
"What we've agreed to do from a clinical perspective is to focus on our longest waiting and most urgent patients in order to bring down that backlog of patients, so that's made a huge difference to how we're managing our patients on the waiting list."
Workforce change
Since 2019 the hospital, which has capacity for 310 beds, has seen a change in staff particularly after the Covid pandemic which is one of the challenges it's had to tackle.
"I think the very biggest challenge that we've had is is in terms of workforce," Ms Midlane said.
"Moving from one location to another, there was some staff who took that opportunity to retire.
"Also during the pandemic, some staff decided that the pandemic management wasn't necessarily for them what they'd expected in their professional career and and that resulted in us running with higher levels of vacancy across our workforce, but particularly in our nursing workforce.
"There has been great work undertaken by both the nursing and our recruitment team to do very focused pieces of recruitment, not only through traditional routes but using social media so that people get the feel for what Papworth can offer, but also that people aren't put off by the specialist nature of Papworth."
Rising demand
With waiting patients, demand has increased at the hospital but that is a hurdle Ms Midlane is not afraid to face head on.
"We are running with backlogs and I would say the acuity of our patients has also increased," she added.
"By that I mean people rarely now come with one single condition; they'll often come with a number of conditions that all need managing holistically at the same time.
"We are working really hard across the organisation in a programme called the flow programme, which is not asking anybody to work any harder, but identifying the barriers that get in the way of us being the most productive we can."