Nottingham City Hospital is a large acute teaching trust providing a wide range of in-patient, out-patient and day care services for a local population of 650,000 people. We also provide specialised services to a wider population of two million people. The hospital occupies a 90-acre site and first opened in 1903. We celebrated our centenary throughout 2003.

More than 6,200 people work at the hospital and we have the valued support of over 850 volunteers. We have 1,100 beds, we care for 55,000 in-patients and 23,000 day surgery patients and we hold almost 255,000 out-patient appointments each year.

We are recognised as a specialist centre for many services, including:

There is no A&E department, but we share responsibility for taking emergency medical admissions with Queen’s Medical Centre. Nottingham City Hospital has high dependency units for children and adults, and three intensive care units – for neonates, adults and cardiac patients.

Staff across the trust work in collaboration with the Queen’s Medical Centre and in 2001 the two hospitals published A Strategic Direction for Hospital Services in Nottingham, setting out their view of how acute services should develop over the next five years. The trust has also recently published its own five-year vision of service developments.

Nottingham City Hospital NHS Trust achieved the maximum three stars in the 2004 NHS Performance Tables – the second successive year we achieved this. We began preparing to become an NHS Foundation Trust in 2004 but decided to withdraw at the end of the year. However, we will apply again in the future and, in the meantime, we are developing a relationship with the people who signed us as members of the trust and with those members who were elected to our new Members’ Council. Their involvement with the trust will be particularly important when we become a Foundation Trust as they will represent the views of our local community. We are always keen to recruit new members who are interested in the development of the hospital and further information is available under the section called ‘NHS Foundation Trust’.

The hospital buildings are a mixture of old and new – the earliest dating back to the early 1900s – and £40 million worth of capital schemes are currently in progress, representing major investment in this trust. Dundee House, our diabetes and cardiac rehabilitation unit opened in March this year, our new cardiac centre and our new urology unit will open in the summer and the clinical haematology unit and our 23-hour unit are scheduled to open early in 2006.

The trust has a major role to play in education and research and has particularly strong links with the University of Nottingham which opened its Clinical Sciences Building on the hospital site in 1998. The teaching of medical students is an integral part of the hospital and adds a powerful stimulus to the achievement of high standards of practice. The wide-ranging expertise in many aspects of clinical care has developed through teaching and research.

We are home to training centres in breast screening techniques and cardiac surgery and Nottingham City Hospital and Queen’s Medical Centre are a Cancer Centre, forming part of the Mid-Trent Cancer Network.

Major research interests include oncology, respiratory medicine, clinical haematology, rheumatology, diabetes/endocrinology, stroke medicine, urology, breast cancer and mineral metabolism.

Nottingham City Hospital is guided by a set of values which influence the way it works. We firmly believe in:

• the principles of the NHS, where high quality care is provided on the basis of need rather than ability to pay.
• the contribution of the local community to the development of our hospital.
• preserving and developing the hospital’s reputation as a caring organisation.
• developing services that are designed around the patient.
• working co-operatively with others in the interests of patients.
• valuing the contribution of our staff and investing in their development.
• the importance of developing innovative approaches to teaching and research, which allow us to be at the forefront of developments in patient care.
• responsible and wise stewardship of public money and effective use of resources.