I want to begin my message this week with another huge thank you to everyone who is continuing to work around the clock to respond to COVID-19 across Humber, Coast and Vale.
Colleagues and partners are continuing to go above and beyond to put in place additional resources and new ways of working to enable us to meet the health and care needs of our population over the coming weeks and months.
As a result, we have seen rapid and significant transformation in the way we deliver health and care services in a matter of weeks, which is nothing short of heroic.
For example, our digital teams across Humber, Coast and Vale have facilitated a huge shift away from face-to-face consultations in GP practices and hospitals and this will continue over the coming weeks and months.
Digital teams are also supporting thousands of colleagues to work remotely from home and continuing to enable the necessary sharing of information to support patient care in a constantly changing environment.
Within primary care, colleagues are rapidly re-configuring local services and the ways in which people access them to keep the most vulnerable in our communities safe, whilst ensuring their health and care needs are met.
This means working even more closely than ever across primary care, community services, social care and the voluntary sector. We have built strong foundations in our Partnership to support this and change is continuing to happen at pace to respond to these new realities.
Partners from across the Yorkshire and Humber region, with support from the military and national colleagues, have come together to create a new hospital in a matter of weeks.
The Nightingale facility in Harrogate will provide additional capacity over and above the significant number of additional beds that colleagues have worked hard to make available within our existing hospitals.
Some of these service transformations are set out in our five-year strategic plan and others have been put in place through necessity to deal with the current crisis.
The challenge for us as a system will be to sort through these changes and work together to maintain the positive aspects of service transformation over the longer term.
There will be time to reflect and carry out this important work, in the meantime, I would like to encourage colleagues from across Humber, Coast and Vale to continue to lean on one another and the strength of our Partnership to get through the days and weeks to come.