On Wednesday 12 August, colleagues from University Hospital of North Tees welcomed Mrs Sue Snowden – Her Majesty’s Lord Lieutenant of County Durham.
Mrs Snowden visited the hospital after writing letters of support during the height of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to colleagues at both University Hospital of North Tees and University Hospital Hartlepool.
Mrs Snowdon was welcomed to our Trust by:
- Julie Gillon, Chief Executive
- Steve Hall, Vice Chair and Non-Executive Director
- Neil Schneider, Non-Executive Director and Deputy Lord-Lieutenant
- Mark White, Governor and Deputy Lord-Lieutenant
- Barbara Bright, Director of Corporate Affairs and Chief of Staff
They each welcomed their guest before inviting colleagues from across the Trust to showcase how well the organisation adjusted and adapted when COVID-19 hit.
From COVID palliative care pathways to partnerships between pathology and workforce, the experiences of our ITU team and the acute respiratory team ambitions to a virtual tour of the emergency and urgent care departments and a digital dial in from the Integrated Single Point of Access Team. The showcase offered an experience of a wide breadth of the changes that were implemented at speed.
In a response directly from Her Majesty’s Lord Lieutenant’s office, colleagues at the hospital were thanked for their efforts.
A thank you to staff
“Mrs Snowdon would like to thank most sincerely Julie, Steve and all those that she met for making her visit so interesting and informative. Mrs Snowdon is so appreciative of the time and effort that everyone put into her visit.
It was a privilege to hear at first hand all that your Trust has been doing and to talk to the staff from different disciplines who clearly have all been working collectively together to meet the significant challenges that you have been facing.
Mrs Snowdon was very much aware of how your staff have put their own lives at risk to care for and save the lives of others, and she was so impressed with all that she heard about how you have been finding new and innovative ways to meet the many challenges that you faced and situations that had never been experienced before. She was also very impressed with what she heard about your preparations for the future and how you would deal successfully with another significant outbreak of the virus when it comes. Your Trust can be very proud of all that you have done and achieved to deal with this terrible new and unknown virus and at the same time maintaining critical services and now dealing with the inevitable backlog of other work.
Once again on behalf of Mrs Snowdon many thanks to everyone who made her visit so memorable and you are to be congratulated on all that you have achieved during this most difficult of times in the history of the NHS.”