Local hospitals go smokefree

and community transmission of Covid-19 as low as possible we will be able to deliver on this ambition through the next few months. In terms of readiness, we have kept in place a lot of the safeguards that were implemented earlier this year to manage the flow of affected patients across our hospitals, and our supplies of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) are much better and much more robust than in April and May. We have also taken the opportunity to increase our intensive and high dependency care beds, our piped oxygen supply and have taken delivery of new equipment such as ventilators to further increase our resilience. We are also working on further developing our testing capacity, with point of care testing (POCT) on the horizon in the not too distant future, POCT will allow us to identify whether patients who are to be admitted have Covid-19, influenza or neither, cutting down on the time it takes for results to be known to 90 minutes – this will be a gamechanger for the Trust. In all, we think that we have prepared as much as possible, and we are once again relying on our health care teams to take us through the next few weeks. We have asked our NHS workers to make such sacrifices throughout this year, and with just a few weeks of relative calm in summer, we are asking them to go again, fighting an illness that it still very much unknown to us, and for that I will be forever grateful to my colleagues. On behalf of Team DBTH, I ask that you again give them as much support as possible by adhering to these new items of guidance and restrictions. As a nation, we have pushed Covid-19 back once, reclaiming parts of our summer in the process – so please, put in the hard work now, dig a little deeper and keep up your commitment to beating this disease. If we manage this, we will be able to look forward to a spring that will not just inhabit a ‘new normal’, but will be just instead moving back to normal. Please remember hands, face and space if you’re out and about, stick to the guidance and look after the vulnerable. As a hospital and a community we have some difficult times ahead – however, as the people of Doncaster and Bassetlaw, you showed us earlier this year that you want to keep each other as safe as possible – if everyone sticks together and looks out for one another in the same way now, we will ensure this second-wave does not have the same impact as the first. Let’s keep going just a little while longer and let’s do it for Doncaster and Bassetlaw.

Richard Parker OBE

Please note Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust does not endorse any of the companies advertised in this guide.