Recognising our unsung heroes
The Estates and Facilities team play a vital role in keeping our services running.
Whether they’re cleaning wards, maintaining buildings, caring for keyworkers’ children, delivering hot meals to patients or providing medical equipment and PPE, our 300 Estates and Facilities staff, permanent, contractors and redeployed, have truly been our ‘unsung heroes’ during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We wanted to recognise the team for the important contribution they make, highlight some of the challenges presented by COVID-19 and the ways in which the they worked together to overcome these.
Ian Greggor, Director of Estates and Facilities, said “The team have had some massive challenges – they’ve had to learn new skills, take on new responsibilities and work in very different ways. But through all of that they’ve continued to achieve the very high standard in cleaning, catering, estates, support services, risk, property development, compliance and all the other things this team does. I’m hugely grateful to all of those who have consistently gone well ‘above and beyond’.”
Here’s just some of the things the Estates and Facilities team have achieved during the last five months:
- Put up new signage at 50 sites and screens at receptions to keep people safe
- Over 100 cleaners have kept our sites clean and hygienic
- Managed and distributed around four million items of PPE
- Delivered hundreds of hours of fire safety training
- Made sure we have enough oxygen cylinders for our patients
- Delivered thousands of meals to patients, including those on COVID-19 wards
- Set up a new central storage and distribution system for PPE
- Delivered fruit and tea/coffee to all our major sites
- Maintained over 60 buildings
- Run three nurseries and provided childcare to keyworkers children
- Looked after the five cars we were loaned by BMW
- Found space at no cost for the expansion of training and learning space at Fitzwilliam House
- Completed the £4m refurbishment of Erlegh House in Reading, despite having to stop for three months during the worst of the pandemic
Here’s a few photos showing the Estate and Facilities team at work. Thank you to all of you for your hard work – we really appreciate everything you do.
