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Visit to University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
21 July 2025
Daniel Elkeles visits University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust.
Improvement
NHS architecture
At the end of last week our chief executive Daniel Elkeles visited University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust to see the many examples of innovative care and the trust's commitment to working closely and collaboratively with local partners to deliver evidence based, personalised neighbourhood care.
Daniel said: "The sheer number of improvement initiatives that the team at Leicester Royal Infirmary, part of University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, packed into a 90-minute visit was extraordinary.
"The highlight for me was the visit to their emergency department, which is the busiest in Europe with around 1000 attendances each day. There were lots of innovations in care underway including:
🔵 Nurse navigators with access to around 150 GP appointments a day in practices around the city and beyond that they can book patients directly into.
🔵 Nurse navigators with access to around 150 GP appointments a day in practices around the city and beyond that they can book patients directly into.
🔵 Opening a 50 bed rehabilitation unit for patients no longer requiring acute care by re-purposing a vacant local authority facility away from the main hospital site.
🔵 Creating an emergency department that is almost totally paperless which has improved flow, efficiency and patient safety. Before they went paperless they tracked that a patient's 'CAS card' moved around the department around 25 times over a two hour period, and the opportunity for both losing it and making errors was high.
"There were similar improvements in planned care with theatre productivity increasing from 60% to 83%, achieved through process changes, good use of the tools on the Federated Data Platform and buckets of cultural change.
"The trust is rolling out Ambient Listening across every outpatient specialty that can demonstrate increased efficiency - specifically, the ability to add at least one new patient to every clinic template - and are getting widespread adoption of this approach. Additionally, a brand new Community Diagnostic Centre has opened in Hinckley, increasing diagnostic capacity.
"Thank you so much to Richard, Jon, Saad and Julie and teams for a superb morning."