The Royal Oldham Hospital hosts summer BBQ for staff and local partners

The Royal Oldham Hospital summer BBQ

Staff at The Royal Oldham Hospital put on a summer BBQ event to give community health and social care staff who have recently transferred employment from Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust into the Northern Care Alliance NHS (NCA) Group a warm welcome.

The weather might have been showery, but there were plenty of smiles as staff from the hospital which is part of the Northern Care Alliance met new community services colleagues at the Fountain Gardens on the hospital site.

Staff were joined by a whole host of local partner organisations, including Oldham Community Leisure, Oldham Athletic, Maggie’s Centre, Oldham Rugby League, Greater Manchester Police, the Fire Service, North West Ambulance Service and Royal Oldham staff, who hosted a range of great stalls to showcase the fantastic health and social care services available to patients and residents across Oldham borough.

Staff were also delighted to welcome and meet with The Worshipful the Mayor of Oldham, Cllr Ginny Alexander, and local MPs, Jim McMahon and Debbie Abrahams. Everyone enjoyed fabulous BBQ food, music courtesy of Radio Cavell (hospital radio), cream teas from local company Scona, and an ice cream van proved to be a popular choice when the sun made an appearance.

Director of Nursing and Chief Officer at The Royal Oldham Hospital, Nicola Firth, said: “We’re delighted to welcome community health and social care services staff who have joined our Oldham Care Organisation as part our family within the Northern Care Alliance.

“As an NHS group, we now employ around 19,000 staff and provide a range of hospital and community healthcare services across Oldham, Bury, Rochdale, Salford and North Manchester.

“We thought that a summer BBQ would be an informal way to give everyone the chance to meet each other and celebrate the coming together of teams here at Oldham.

“Going forward, we believe that the integration of our community and acute services will bring many benefits for the patients and communities we serve.

“It will help us to focus on delivering safe, person centred care that helps us to achieve  faster improvements to health and wellbeing of all our patients and families across the borough through better joined up care, earlier intervention,  and prevention and providing support closer to people’s homes, reducing the dependence on hospital services."

On 1 July, around 1,300 staff and a range of community healthcare services transferred from Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust to the Northern Care Alliance NHS Group which brings together Salford Royal and Pennine Acute Trusts.

The scope of services which have transferred, following a decision by local commissioners, includes community healthcare services for adults in Bury, Oldham and Rochdale, and children’s services in Bury and Oldham. The NCA already provides the majority of adult services in Rochdale through the One Rochdale Local Care Organisation (LCO) and integrated community service teams.