The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has praised the “amazing” work of staff at Maidstone Hospital.

Steve Barclay visited the Hermitage Lane site last Thursday and heard about the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust’s (MTW) innovative new methods.

He visited A&E, which cares for around 300 people each day.

He also went to the MTW Care Coordination Centre (CCC) which uses real-time data to monitor the trust’s 700 beds to improve the movement of patients through its hospitals.

This has significantly reduced the amount of time a bed is empty, as well as the amount of time a patient spends in A&E before being moved to a bed, and ensures patients arriving by ambulance are moved to where they need to be quickly.

Mr Barclay said: “The team at MTW have done an amazing job. You get a real sense when walking around this trust of just how much has been achieved and the impact this makes on patient care. I want to pay tribute to the hard work and innovation shown by the staff.”

The visit comes as A&E departments in some parts of Kent have been left resembling war zones as patients wait days to be admitted to overstretched hospitals.

Last month a person seeking treatment walked into an emergency unit in the county every 23 seconds, and the tidal wave of cases has seen the number of people waiting more than 12 hours to be admitted to a ward soar in recent months.

Patients and their families have told KentOnline how in some cases they have waited for days before a bed has become available as our hospitals face record demand for A&E services.

Mr Barclay also sat down with clinical staff to talk about a range of topics including the trust’s Community Diagnostic Centre in Maidstone, which opened in 2021 and delivered 12,000 MRI and CT scans in just six months.

He was also told about the Kent and Medway Orthopaedic Centre at Maidstone Hospital, where preliminary work is under way on a new theatre complex which will increase surgical capacity across Kent and Medway and reduce the number of patients waiting for an orthopaedic operation when it is completed next year.

Trust chief executive, Miles Scott, said: “Our approach at MTW is not just more of the same, but new ways of working to meet an increase in demand. Our bed management system and the development of our Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) units, help make the very best use of the clinics, wards and specialist skilled staff in our hospitals."

In 2022, the trust treated almost 840,000 patients, including 2,000 Covid patients. It saw an increase in cancer referrals and a record 190,000 attendances through its two A&Es.

MTW is one of the only trusts in England to have no patients waiting more than 52 weeks for planned surgery, is regularly in the top five for A&E performance and has met the national cancer standard each month for more than three years.