This year has been 11 years for you in PPU! what have been some of your greatest achievements and career highlights?

I am very grateful for having been a member of the amazing PPU team for 11 years. I have been privileged to be part of as well as witness many PPU achievements over the years but I always take extra pride in setting up PPU’s Service Delivery, Enquiries, Sales and last but not least Marketing functions & teams over the years as well as being part of setting up and launching our Dialysis unit and our Hadley Wood site.

 

In what ways has PPU grown and developed, from 11 years back to now?

PPU has developed and diversified over the years to be one of the largest PPUs nationwide. Since I have joined the team, we have grown our Lyndhurst outpatient suite from 2 consulting rooms to now; a full outpatient suite complete with dedicated minor ops rooms. Our inpatient capacity has doubled encompassing our dedicated HDU beds, we have set up our private dialysis unit, our cardiology investigation suite and last but not least opened our Hadley Wood daycase hospital in Barnet complete with its own state of the art dedicated radiology and outpatient suites.

 

You manage a number of services and teams within the unit, during the peak of the pandemic PPU had to temporarily suspend all private services dedicating all of its facilities and redeploying the staff to supporting the trust in managing the surge. I imagine you had to manage differently to the ways you are used to, given the changes in the ways of working and redeployment. How was this for you and did you learn anything from this?

PPU is very proud to having been able to support the trust during both the first and second Covid surges by way of reassigning all of our facilities to the NHS and redeploying all of our staff to support the trust during those challenging times. It was a learning experience for all involved, myself included. It was an amazing effort that saw us working together as a team subject to very difficult conditions and circumstances involving staff shortage due to sickness and isolation as well as having to reassign facilities, redesign services’ delivery pathways to incorporate Covid infection protection control measures  and redeploy entire teams to support different wards and divisions across the trust. PPU is particularly proud of being heavily involved in the initial vaccine rollout programme and the set up of our vaccination centres.

 

How do you motivate your teams and boost staff morale?

I am very privileged to work with an excellent professional team who are self motivated and autonomous. We are one big friendly team and we all get along well together! We enjoy working together and there is never a dull moment…we also enjoy organising lunches out and after work get togethers, this keeps us all motivated to keep working hard supporting each other.

 

Given your responsibilities, how do you shut off and relax after work?

I usually spend my evenings after work at home hanging out with my family and cats. I enjoy my quiet evenings at home catching up with my children on their day at school and relaxing with my cats.