One year on from coming together in a merger, new collaboration between Royal Brompton and St Thomas’ hospitals has enabled teams carrying out life-saving cardiac surgery to work around operational pressures and prevent delays to patient treatments.
Working together, the surgical teams have now carried out several major heart operations by sharing facilities across hospitals, for patients who were originally facing delays due to a combination of operational pressures caused by the pandemic.
The patients originally due to be operated on at St Thomas’ Hospital got switched to theatres at the Royal Brompton, the first going into theatre on 13 January. All are reported to be doing well. Further operations are planned over the next few weeks.
“There is currently a tremendous pressure to operate on our cardiac surgery patients in a timely fashion. Exploiting the great strengths we have across the organisation is the key to tackling this. The strong collaboration between our surgical, anaesthetic, nursing and management teams has enabled us to treat some of the most time-critical patients,” said consultant cardiac surgeon and clinical lead at the Royal Brompton, Mario Petrou.
“Happily our new, larger, merged organisation can do more for our patients with the combined power and capacity that it now has over a greater number of operating theatres, hospitals, and cardiac teams.”
Consultant cardiac surgeon at St Thomas’ Kamran Baig said: “These are priority patients who have needed either coronary artery bypass or aortic valve operations. I’m pleased to say the procedures have gone very smoothly and the patients have had very good outcomes.
“We’ve come as a group – as surgeons, anaesthetists, scrub nurses – and we’ve interacted directly with our counterparts who have been very welcoming, accommodating and supportive. It adds a personal touch and it’s important for us to learn how things are done differently.”
Members of the theatres, anaesthesia and perioperative team from St Thomas’, who worked with Mr Baig’s cardiovascular team, all spoke of how much they’d enjoyed the challenge of working in a new, though very similar, environment:
- Operating department practitioner Rachael Baines said: “The staff have been amazing – they’ve been really welcoming and really helpful showing us the different equipment that they use – just making us feel welcome in a new environment. It’s quite a good learning opportunity because we can see that things are done better in some ways.”
- Consultant cardiac anaesthetist Dr Martin John said: “From the anaesthetic practice we’ve had very good collaboration with the team…It’s quite nice to see how different units manage similar problems.”
- Senior staff nurse Connie Koh said: “The whole team seems like its connecting quite well and everything has gone very smoothly – no hustle-bustle.”
- Trainee surgical care practitioner Mark Salo said: “Coming here to Brompton hospital from St Thomas’ has been really good. It’s been smooth and the staff nurses and other perfusionists were all very welcoming.”
Cardiologist and chief executive of the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospital Dr Richard Grocott-Mason said the collaboration between the surgical teams underlined one of the many reasons why the merger had been so important.
“We always knew that there would be significant benefits in merging our two organisations but this really sums up what it is all about – bringing together expertise, experience and resources to deliver even better patient care. And right now, with the pressures we are facing, the kind of extra resource we have been able to create here for just some of our patients is just a great example of those benefits being delivered.”
Merger Year One 
This story is among a number we will be featuring over the next few weeks, marking a year since the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals merged with Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, on 1 February 2021, and demonstrating the benefits of the two organisations coming together.