Behind-the-scenes teams at Lincoln, Boston and Grantham hospitals ‘keep us all fed and watered and the hospitals running efficiently’ says ULHT director

The important work of behind-the-scenes teams across Grantham, Lincoln and Boston hospitals is the focus of a column by the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust director of estates and facilities Mike Parkhill. He writes:

Do you know that we have a dedicated team of non-clinical colleagues who work hard behind the scenes to make sure our hospitals in Lincoln, Grantham and Boston, are able to provide outstanding care for our patients?

The estates and facilities team covers a wide range of roles, all critical to the running of hospitals and the experience of patients and staff. This includes porters, switchboard teams, catering teams, housekeepers, deep clean teams, maintenance teams, linen services, capital projects teams and so many more.

They are also responsible for the multi-million pound developments and structural upgrades taking place across the trust, as well as managing the day-to-day services, buildings and critical infrastructure.

Every year across Lincoln, Grantham and Boston hospitals:

·Housekeepers serve patients around four million cups of tea and more than 1.2 million meals on the wards;

·Porters help 60,000 patients to get to where they need to be in the hospitals and can walk up to 10 miles in a shift;

·Linen services supply more than 3.6 million pieces of linen for the hospitals;

·Post rooms manage around 1.68 million letters that are posted by the trust;

·More than 31,000 repairs and tasks are completed through the estates helpdesk;

·Deep cleaning teams deep clean 80 wards using hydrogen peroxide vapour machines;

·Hospital restaurants serve around 150,000 hot meals to patients, visitors and staff;

·The switchboard team handles around 3,000 calls every day;

·Over the last year the capital projects team has completed the new theatres at Grantham Hospital, completed the enabling works for the Pilgrim [Boston] emergency department transformation and the building of the new resuscitation department at Lincoln hospital. A total investment of £24 million during the year.

Looking to the future we have lots of exciting developments taking place. We have the ongoing transformation of the emergency department at Pilgrim, the final phase of the works at Lincoln emergency department, supporting the creation of two more community diagnostic centres in the county and other capital projects that will support outstanding care personally delivered for the people of Lincolnshire.

During this financial year we aim to invest a further £40 million in capital projects across our hospitals.

The range of roles across the estates and facilities team is massive, but the key point is that they all support all of our hospitals and teams, as well as patients. They keep us all fed and watered and the hospitals running efficiently, as well as maintaining our buildings and creating the state-of-the-art environments that our patients and colleagues deserve.