About us
We are Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust, better known as Gateshead Health.
Based in the North East of England we provide a range of hospital and community health services from our leading facilities, including the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Blaydon urgent care centre and Bensham Hospital, all within Gateshead.
Established in 2005, we were one of the first foundation trusts in the country and since then have consistently achieved the highest levels of care for patients.
We now employ around 4,800 staff and currently provide 444 hospital beds across the Gateshead region.
Based in the North East of England we provide a range of hospital and community health services from our leading facilities, including the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Blaydon urgent care centre and Bensham Hospital, all within Gateshead.
Specialist services:
Alongside a full range of local hospital and community services, we provide specialist services, including:
- A breast screening service for Gateshead, South Tyneside, Sunderland and parts of Durham. The Trust offers superb standards of treatment – from scanning and diagnosis to treatment.
- The North-Eastern hub for the National Bowel Cancer and AAA Screening Programmes, covering a population of around seven million people.
- Cutting edge care in our state-of-the-art facilities. Including our Emergency Care Centre, Pathology Centre of Excellence and the Peter Smith Surgery Centre.
Our maternity services are rated among the very best in the country and our work treating gynaecological cancers has built up a national and international reputation. We also run the Gateshead Fertility Centre, one of the top ten IVF clinics in the country, which has created hundreds of new families in the North East over the last decade.
We have robotic surgery capacity for the first time which will allow for new services to be offered like robotic keyhole surgery.
Treatment for gynaecological cancers which have built up a positive reputation nationally and internationally. Services are now provided up to the Scottish borders, through to Cumbria and as far down as Whitby.
We are an active partner in the “Gateshead Cares” system board and are committed to the Alliance Agreement which underpins collaborative system-wide-working and accountability in Gateshead.
QE Facilities
QE Facilities (QEF) is a well-established wholly-owned subsidiary. It is a separate legal body set up to provide a range of non-clinical Estates and Facilities services.
QE Facilities have also expanded into a number of exciting projects that are delivering significant savings and efficiencies. In this very difficult economic environment, our expanding business provides a unique option to traditional full third-party outsourcing.
QEF has been established on the solid foundations of the NHS and is able to provide a flexible, proactive range of high-quality services, delivered on the lines of a commercial organisation.
Gateshead Care Partnership
Since October 1 2016, a new organisation called the Gateshead Care Partnership has been providing NHS community services across the borough by bringing together teams from the NHS, Community Based Care Ltd (whose membership comprises all Gateshead GPs) and Gateshead Council.
This innovative new partnership enables the whole system to work together more effectively so that all the experts from doctors and nurses to GPs and social workers are working together on better, more responsive care. By coming together in this way, we bring everyone into a single organisation with patient care at its heart.
We are committed to delivering high quality, safe care to everyone who accesses Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust.
To support us in achieving this, we monitor our services to ensure we meet national standards, performance targets and guidelines. These are set by the independent health and social care regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
To meet the CQC’s standards and achieve our aims and objectives of being an outstanding Trust delivering high quality, safe care, we have robust procedures and policies in place to continuously manage and evaluate our performance as an NHS Foundation Trust. These procedures and policies govern the standards of care we provide, the standard of leadership across the trust and our business and financial management and ensure we closely monitor everything we do year in and year out.
