On Saturday 5 March 2022, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) will be hosting a Super Saturday to help boost the recovery of services affected by the pandemic and celebrate the continuing hard work of NHS staff.
Super Saturday is part of the National Paediatric Accelerator Programme, an initiative designed to bring together ten NHS trusts to tackle waiting lists inflated by the impact of the pandemic. The ten trusts involved in the programme are Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, Evelina London Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), Leeds Children’s Hospital, Manchester Children’s Hospital, Oxford University Hospital, Sheffield Children’s Hospital and University Hospital Southampton.
The first Super Saturday took place on Saturday 16 October 2021, and was instrumental in helping five of the children’s hospitals involved in the paediatric accelerator see 5% more patients between April and November of that year.
This March, GOSH will host a range of additional activity to see more children waiting for treatment and to celebrate the staff making it all possible. Extra outpatient clinics will open for children across the hospital, including in haematology and oncology, dermatology, and urology, while extra theatre slots will open in gastroenterology, neurosurgery, thoracic surgery and general surgery. Imaging teams will also be running extra MRI, X-ray and ultrasound scans throughout the day.
Lab, pharmacy, and theatre teams at Great Ormond Street will be running tours to show patients what happens during surgeries or during sample processing with the aim of replacing fear with curiosity. Heart and lung transplant patients and families who are anxious about surgery or afraid of needles will be shown around theatres to help reduce anxiety.
Mike Stylianou, a Senior Operating Department Practitioner who works with patients who have procedural anxiety at GOSH, says:
“About 70% of our patient population will experience anxiety around procedures, which can often begin long before they arrive at hospital. The beautiful thing about bringing families in for tours of the theatres for Super Saturday is that it can disrupt some of these anxieties and fears, encouraging new ways of thinking and underpinning trust to help create a better hospital experience for everyone. A calm child can be made anxious by an anxious parent so the holistic approach of showing them all around theatre as a group really works.”
A range of extra refreshments will be available for staff to enjoy throughout the day to keep energy levels high, while the much-loved Pets as Therapy (PAT) dogs will return to GOSH to lift the spirits of staff and patients alike.
Mat Shaw, Chief Executive at GOSH, says:
“Super Saturday is a great opportunity for us to help even more children and young people as our services continue to recover from the effects of the pandemic. We have some brilliant activity planned for this weekend with lots of our staff getting stuck in. It is down to their hard work and dedication that we can continue to tackle waiting times for the patients and families that rely on us, so we say a huge thank you to all the teams taking part.”