Trust celebrates tenth birthday
October marks our tenth anniversary when North West London Hospitals NHS Trust and Ealing Hospital NHS Trust merged to create London North West Healthcare NHS Trust.
It led to creation of one of the largest integrated hospital trusts in the UK with more than 8,000 staff.
The tagline ‘Stronger Together’ reflected the need for a growing number of acute trusts to come together to become more sustainable organisations.
Outgoing Chief Executive David McVitie said the new super trust would focus on ‘providing services that prevent ill-health and join up care across hospital, community and home.’
The merger took more than two years of planning involving a host of stakeholders who attended more than 60 events.
Ralph Elias, one of the team who worked on the merger, said: “It was a huge logistical and cultural challenge to bring together the clinical and corporate services of two trusts.
“It seemed logical for hospitals to join forces to achieve economies of scale making them more viable, sustainable and attractive to staff. Barts Health NHS Trust was the first of a series of mergers in the capital and we followed suit.
“New commissioning standards, the opportunity to bring together clinical services to expand the scale and scope of the services offered, and the prospect of a more challenging funding environment were all important arguments for the merger.
“We also saw the larger organisation as critical to the digital transformation that we achieved with the implementation of Cerner at the end of last year.
“A big challenge was recognising and respecting the distinct identities and cultures of the hospitals and trying not to impose one on the other. It was a big ask for staff, but we made it work and here we are today.”