News and events

News and events

Nelft logo

News

NELFT NHS Foundation Trust provides a range of community health and mental health services across the north east London Boroughs of Barking & Dagenham, Havering, Redbridge, Waltham Forest, Essex and Kent and Medway.

Read the latest NELFT news, including information on our services, new trust staff, research and development of our services.

NHS staff set up new COVID-19 recovery ward in a week

NHS staff in Essex transformed an unused ward in Brentwood Community Hospital in just one week to provide recovery care for COVID-19 patients.

Teams in North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) worked tirelessly in already challenging circumstances to create the new ward in the Essex hospital to create 19 new beds to support acute hospitals in the area.

Patients who have contracted COVID-19 who no longer need acute care, but still require medical support and care, are transferred to our recovery and rehabilitation wards, which now includes the new Courage Ward at Brentwood Community Hospital. The 19 new beds join the more than 70 extra beds that have been created at Brentwood since the start of the pandemic, and mean NHS staff at acute hospitals can care for more seriously ill patients.

Julie Hoare, Project Director, NELFT, said: “We set up a third ward to take patients that no longer need acute care in hospital, but still need some nursing and medical care. Patients will be discharged from hospital and be cared for by the amazing staff we have here at Brentwood.”

Dominic Ward, Assistant Director for Frailty and Immediate Care, NELFT, said: “The new ward will help get patients out of hospital sooner so we can support them in a community setting local to them and get them discharged safely. The team have worked extremely hard to get the wards set up and running as quick as we possibly can.”

BCH - Courage ward Brid Johnson, Director of Operations (Essex and Kent), said “We are in an extremely pressured time but our teams in Essex, once again, stepped up to the challenge and went above and beyond to provide care and support for our patients.

“In the last 10 months they have transformed unused wards, created new wards and provided just under 100 extra recovery beds so patients can leave hospital sooner and receive community care closer to their homes.”

This website makes use of Essential Cookies, as defined in the UK GDPR, in order to function and to improve your security, e.g. when submitting forms. These Essential Cookies are only for security and site function, and do not track individual in any way.

In order to better understand your needs and so improve our services to you, this website may also make use of some cookies that are used for traffic analytics or other behavioural statistics ("Analytics Cookies"). More details can be found on our Privacy Page .

If you are happy to accept these Analytics Cookies, please press the Accept button; if you are not happy to accept these Analytics Cookies, this site will still work correctly but some third party services (such as some videos or social media feeds) may not display.

Please choose a setting: