Miracle Babies, Miracle Workers

As the CEO of Liverpool Women's Hospital, every day brings new challenges, opportunities and my pride in our staff and our services grows all of the time. At Liverpool Women's we have the only Emergency Room in the UK dedicated to women with gynaecological or early pregnancy issues. Last week we opened our new Emergency Room that has been relocated to the ground floor. A massive thank you to our staff who went the extra mile to ensure the move went smoothly. The new facilities are a massive improvement.

I was recently contacted on twitter by a lady who wanted to share with me the achievements of her 10 year old daughter Beth Copeland.  Beth's mum was referred to our Fetal Medicine Unit from her local hospital. She was cared for by Professor Zarko Alfarevich who provided a different prognosis.  Last week Zarko and myself had the pleasure of meeting Beth with her mum and dad.  Beth is in mainstream school, she has presented flowers to the Queen and she is the cover girl for Motability. Her ambition is to be a doctor. A truly amazing young lady, it was a pleasure to meet Beth and her parents.

Last week we held our quarterly Council of Governors meeting.  It was great to welcome some new people to their first meeting. Our new public governors are Kathleen Kearney (Central Liverpool), Pauline Burke and Pat Speed (both Sefton) and Helen White (rest of England & Wales), we look forward to working with each of these in the coming months and years. We also welcomed Gillian Walker, a staff governor representing the interests of our midwives.

On Thursday of last week we had an interesting and informative meeting with the Care Quality Commission.

We have had a very busy few weeks as we have been preparing for our final bid submission for the 100,000 genome project.  Thank you to everybody who has worked so hard on this, especially our Genetics teams.

If you follow us on twitter or Facebook, you will have seen local media coverage on our involvement in One Born Every Minute.  Filming is going really well. We are still looking to recruit a couple more families to take part in the series, and will be hosting an online Q&A from 8-9pm this Wednesday (5th November) on our Twitter and Facebook pages if you'd like to know more about what's involved with taking part in the show.

Finally, I am fortunate to get to see behind the scenes of our wonderful hospital on a daily basis.  Each and everyday there are truly heart-warming and at times heartbreaking issues faced by families accessing our services. The staff who work on our Neonatal Unit really are amazing.  They care for the smallest, most vulnerable babies imaginable. Their expertise and their passion for what they do is wonderful to see.  For the next 4 weeks starting tonight on Channel 5 is Miracle Babies. You will get to see the amazing work of our Neonatal Unit, be sure to tune in or set it to record!