Consultant in Geriatric Medicine

To provide, in conjunction with consultant colleagues, the Trust's Geriatric Medicine service. Our Geriatric Medicine team is one of the largest in the Trust and provides inpatient and outpatient care across all our hospitals with consultant-led beds at The Northumbria, Wansbeck, North Tyneside and Wansbeck General Hospitals and our Community Hospitals., We are committed to developing patient pathways beyond the traditional secondary care inpatient/outpatient model to better meet the needs of frail patients in our communities. This is aligned with the trust strategy to ensuing we provide the best care for our local people, in the right place, whatever the stage of a person's life.

Our Acute service is based at the Northumbria Specialist Emergency care Hospital (NSECH), with 19 inpatient beds on our dedicated Admissions Ward for patients presenting to ED either directly or via their GP, and a peripatetic Frailty Assessment Service (FAS), which is consultant-led with Nurse Practitioner and therapist support, providing assessment of frail patients in ED itself, with the aim of initiating CGA early in the patient journey and facilitating early direct move to the most appropriate place for ongoing care; whether that be their home or one of our inpatient facilities.

More recently we have opened an Elderly Assessment Unit (EAU) in Wansbeck Hospital with aims to provide same or next day assessment to frail patients in response to acute deterioration.

We manage three major locality hospitals at North Tyneside, Wansbeck and Hexham, plus a number of smaller community hospitals and clinics from Tynemouth to Berwick on Tweed, in addition to our state-of-the-art Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital, the first of its kind in England. We also care for people in their homes and provide services from facilities in local communities such as health centres. We give people greater choice and control over their care to help them to live independently at home and avoid hospital admission where appropriate. High quality patient care is at the heart of everything we do and we strive to ensure every single patient and service user has an exceptional experience with us. We have one of the most extensive patient experience programmes of any trust in England.