News

A team from Kettering General Hospital has been shortlisted for a prestigious national award for reducing unnecessarily long stays in hospital for patients.

The hospital’s Long Stay Wednesday Team has made it through into the finals of the HSJ Awards 2019 in the Acute or Specialist Service Redesign Initiative category.

Hundreds of NHS and social care organisations enter the awards each year and competition is fierce in all of the award categories.

In August 2018 KGH launched an initiative called Long Stay Wednesday where a team of key senior staff meet with ward teams and partner organisations each week (on a Wednesday) to concentrate on helping long-stay patients to leave hospital.

Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is holding elections to appoint ten new Governors to help shape its future.

The Trust is looking for local people who want to become Governors to represent their local community and have a say on how healthcare should be provided locally.

As a Foundation Trust Kettering General Hospital has a Trust Board made up of Executive and Non-Executive Directors accountable to a 25-strong Council of Governors who represent the local area.

Postal and email vote elections are being held in August and September 2019. 

Meet William – a new £45,000 state-of-the-art Cardiac Echo Ultrasound Simulator that will give Kettering General Hospital’s physiologists and doctors vital practice in detecting heart problems.

William has been gifted to KGH by a grateful Desborough couple whose £130,000 cardiac equipment legacy will help hundreds of patients each year.

Some fantastic countryside and wildlife murals that bring the outside inside have been painted in some of Kettering General Hospital’s wards for older people.

The intricate designs cover the walls in two patient day rooms – one on the Naseby wards and one on the HC Pretty wards - and are especially designed to help support patients with dementia.

As well as sparking happy memories, provoking conversation and providing a calming atmosphere the murals are liberally sprinkled with butterflies and dragonflies which support activities which can help occupy patients with dementia – such as counting them as a distraction if they become unsettled.

The Trust Boards at both Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust and Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust are pleased to announce that they have agreed to appoint a Chief People Officer across both organisations.

The appointment will initially be on a secondment basis for nine months, from September 1, 2019.  

Mark Smith, the current Director of Human Resources and Organisational Development at Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will be seconded into the role.

Intensive Care Unit Staff Nurse Mairead McNally has attended the prestigious Florence Nightingale Leadership Programme which aims to develop the next generation of NHS leaders.

She was one of 30 nurses from across the country selected by their organisations to take part in the leadership programme held in London by the Florence Nightingale Foundation.

Mairead, from Corby, has worked at KGH since qualifying as a nurse in 2012 and for the last five years has worked in our Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

A new pilot project to provide mums-to-be with complete continuity of care with midwives they know is being launched by Kettering General Hospital.

The Eden Continuity of Care Team consists of six midwives who will be looking after 210 pregnant women from the Lakeside Practice in Corby over the next year.

The new team will be officially launched tomorrow, Friday, July 19, but since June 1 the team has been working with mums who will benefit from the project.

Kettering General Hospital officially launched its new electric buggy service on July 16.

The buggy – similar to an electric golf cart – will enable less able patients to be driven by registered hospital volunteers to and from the hospital from set pick up points located around the hospital site at various entrances and car parks.

The launch involved a ribbon cutting ceremony and a patient – Joe Huitson - being symbolically driven to the hospital entrance in the buggy by his daughter, Senior Cardiographer Louise Huitson, who came up with the idea.

A new way of supporting mothers-to-be who need to have caesarean sections has been developed by Kettering General Hospital.

The Trust has developed a Planned Caesarean Section team which will, ideally, enable a mother to see the same midwife throughout her visits to hospital until she has given birth.

 The team was officially launched today Monday, July 15 at an event at Bay 14 on Rowan Ward at 2.30pm.

Picture caption – L-R Healthcare Assistant Lorraine Preedy, Lead Midwife Mary Grey, Jessica Fowler and baby Fox, and midwives Victoria Hutchinson, Helen Sharp and Wendy Eady. 

A chance to tour Kettering General Hospital’s new Maxillo-Facial Unit, Simulation Suite and Dementia Garden are all available at the Trust’s Annual Members’ Meeting on Tuesday, July 16.

The tours are just one of a number of activities and opportunities to enable members of the public to find out more about the hospital, its services, and its plans for the future.

The Annual Members’ Meeting is being held in the Prince William Lecture Theatre at the main hospital site from 3.30pm-7pm. You do not need to be a member of Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to attend