Patients, staff and families share gratitude as Thank You Day gets under way
Sunday is the third annual Thank You Day – and St George’s, Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals and Health Group is asking people to join us in thanking our staff and volunteers for all their amazing work.
The awareness event started off with a handful of organisations looking for a way to thank everyone who helped through the Covid pandemic, which our staff and volunteers, as well as those across the wider NHS, had a crucial role.
Now, Thank You Day has grown to include hundreds of partners and 15 million people have taken part in Thank You Day celebrations – including those working in the NHS.
There are many reasons our staff deserve a thank you.
Thousands of people come to us every day – including more than 800 to our three emergency departments.
Last year, our teams also delivered more than 7,600 babies, performed an x-ray every 89 seconds, and carried out 200 kidney transplants – and also provided outstanding care to neurology, cardiology and cancer patients, among others.
We have 17,000 staff working for our hospitals group. They care for a population of four-million people in South West London and North East Surrey across three main busy hospitals – as well as services from other locations.
How you can show your thanks
Patients, visitors, and family members can get in touch to share messages of thanks and compliments. So far this year, 326 staff across our group have been thanked in this way.
Staff working across a number of areas have been thanked – including nurses, doctors, physios, porters, cleaners and people in our catering team, among many others.
Words used to describe our staff in these messages of thanks include “amazing”, “reassuring”, “kind”, “friendly”, “helpful”, and “brilliant”.
If you would like to thank a member of staff, you can pass a message on. For St George’s click here, and for Epsom and St Helier click here.
You can also make a donation to one of our charities – the ESTH Charity can be found here, and the St George’s Hospital Charity here.
And you can share your messages of thanks with us on social media.
What our patients and staff say
There are many examples of the outstanding care our staff provide, but we would like to share these two stories, which we recently posted on our websites.
The family of five-year-old Jackson, a St George’s leukaemia patient, only have amazing things to say about the teams. Dad Shaun says: “Everything that St George’s has done, from the very beginning, has been reassuring. The nurses on Pinckney ward have always gone above and beyond for us.”
You can read more about Jackson here.
Meanwhile, Oana Dunne, whose son Nathan is undergoing treatment at Epsom Hospital, also for leukaemia, says: “The staff are amazing, they know what they have to do and are always helpful – and if they don’t know the answers to my questions, they will find out. We’re in and out really quickly, and I look forward to the days when we are in Epsom Hospital now.”
You can read more about Nathan here.
It’s not just patients saying thank you, either – we also receive messages from our staff who would like to thank colleagues, even if it is something as small as making a cup of tea during a busy day.
Recent messages from colleagues include a thank you to Gail, our Falls Clinical Nurse Specialist, for ensuring crash mats are provided in certain areas to help prevent harm to patients at risk of injury from falls, and one from our Neonatal Team to a group of League of Friends volunteers who helped spruce up the unit’s garden.
