"Communication"

Thank you for taking the time to leave us some feedback about your recent experience of trying to contact the Trust; we do appreciate it. As a responsible healthcare provider, it is important that the Trust can be easily contacted, and we are therefore disappointed to read you encountered difficulties with your calls being connected to our main switchboard. Please accept our apologies for any concern or frustration caused as this was not our intention.

At present, the Trust is part way through an ambitious programme of IT upgrades to that will benefit all patients; this includes the installation of a new telephone system which will, once fully implemented, increase our telephone capacity across all of our main and community sites (of which we have many!), and make it a great deal easier for patients to reach the departments they want to talk to. A programme of works of this size and nature does take time and will, as with any major project, experience glitches which we strive to quickly resolve as and when they arise. There have been occasions when these technical glitches have resulted in the Switchboard Team receiving a sharp increase in calls, and this has meant they have not been able to be as responsive to all inbound calls as they would hope. We are very sorry for this and wish to assure you, and all of our healthcare population, that we are doing our utmost to deliver a robust and reliable telephone system as quickly as the programme allows.

We very much hope that you have now been able to make contact with Trust but if you have any further difficulties, then please contact our Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) at esh-tr.palse@nhs.net where the team will endeavour to assist you.