Royal Surrey Hospital – Community Open Day.

It is rare you get the opportunity to see the inner workings of a major hospital; so Suzanne and I were delighted to be invited to attend the Community Open Day at Royal Surrey on Saturday June 28^th. It was a very busy day, with hundreds of visitors young and old having tours of the various hospital departments and seeing the number of volunteer and charitable organisations connected to the running of the hospital wand welfare of their patients. There was even an opportunity to climb on board, or press the sirens on, a number of emergency vehicles. 

We were privileged to be escorted round by Joss Bigmore, the Chair of the Royal Surrey Foundation Trust, who having only been the post a couple of years seemed to know the names of all the staff and volunteers we met. He also furnished us with some amazing statistics including the fact they have 5,300 dedicated staff and nearly 300 volunteers who see around 90,000 patients in the emergency department and over half a million in out-patients over a year. 

The hospitals offers some 350 careers and provides around 100 placement opportunities a year.

We had a fascinating tour of one of the operating theatres with its state of the art robotic surgical arms, controlled by a surgeon. They can each carry out up to four prostrate operations a day in the theatre (when previously only one would be possible) and because they need to make less incisions the patients can return home the same day rather than spending three days in hospital. The hospital has four of these machines with a further four on the way. We then visited the cancer centre and saw how the radiotherapy unit works carrying out over 3,800 sessions a year.

It is a great idea to open the hospital up in this way and hopefully it will encourage people to apply to be a part of it whether a volunteer, placement or a full time career.

I would recommend it for a fascinating insight to hospital life when the opportunity arises again next year.