King's Health Partners end of year message

2015 has seen our partnership make excellent progress, using our combined strength and expertise to make a difference to our patients, services users and local communities. We continue to do this against a challenging backdrop of increasing financial, regulatory and capacity pressure on the services we provide.

It is credit to all of our hardworking and dedicated staff across our four partner organisations that we have been able to achieve success in these difficult circumstances, and I would like to thank you all. I would also like to thank our local, national and international partners for their ongoing support and commitment to collaborative working during the past year, as our work would not be possible without it.

I would like to use this opportunity to briefly touch on a few of the notable successes of 2015:

• in May we published our first annual report for the Department of Health, which sets out just how far we have come as a partnership in delivering on our mission for excellence in clinical care, research and education;

• in October we launched our new King’s Health Partners Institutes Programme to bring together our partnership’s collective strength in a range of areas to deliver world-class patient care and research;

• we have continued to make progress in our Mind and Body programme including an innovative ward-twinning project, the development of new education and training initiatives and our first ever staff health and wellbeing conference;

• along with our local partners, we were named as part of the new South London NHS Genomic Medicine Centre as part of the ground-breaking 100,000 Genomes Project;

• cancer at King’s Health Partners was awarded the prestigious Comprehensive Cancer Centre status by the Organisation of European Cancer Institutes (OECI) in recognition of our excellence in patient care, research and training;

• we continue to publish our Outcomes Books to help drive up the quality and
  value of the care we provide;

• we ended 2014 with the Research Excellence Framework (REF) placing our Clinical Medicine third in the country for research quality and Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience second nationally for research power. We are now also ranked eighth in the Times Higher Education world rankings for Clinical, Pre-clinical and Health, up from eleventh last year;

• we have continued to demonstrate our commitment to integrated care, including our work to join up electronic patient records at our three trusts (through the HSJ Award-shortlisted KHP Online) and to expand this project into primary care;

• all three of our partner trusts are now smoke-free and we are piloting this approach at our university partner to help provide a healthy environment for staff, patients and students;

• all three of our trusts increased their levels of clinical research studies in the last year;

• 25 resources have been added to our King’s Health Partners Learning Hub this year, bringing the total to 70 e-learning opportunities available to all staff across our partnership;

• our King’s Sierra Leone Partnership have played a vital role in helping the country become Ebola free and have been honoured with both prestigious team and individual awards during the past twelve months for their efforts, including the top prizes for best international projects at the Guardian University and Times Higher Education Awards;

• we have welcomed new people to our partnership’s leadership team. Lord Kerslake and Nick Moberly have joined King’s College Hospital as its new Chair and Chief Executive, Roger Paffard has joined South London and Maudsley as its new Chair, and Amanda Pritchard has become Acting Chief Executive at Guy’s and St Thomas, with Sir Ron Kerr retiring from his Chief Executive post but continuing his contribution to King’s Health Partners in his new role as Executive Vice Chairman.

Looking to the year ahead, 2016 presents us with an opportunity to further realise our potential. By working more closely together across traditional organisational boundaries and delivering more joined up care, research and education we can not only improve care for the people we serve, but we can also begin to tackle some of the major challenges the NHS is facing.

I wish you and your families a relaxing and happy festive period.

Professor Sir Robert Lechler
Executive Director, King's Health Partners