In April 2026, the RCP visited South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust to hear from clinicians about the innovation shaping patient care across the region. Executive medical director and consultant physician Dr Shaz Wahid discusses the trust’s approach to bringing specialist care closer to home through innovation, integration and clinically led service improvement.
South Tyneside and Sunderland serves around 430,000 people, with a population that is older than the national average and projected to age further over the coming decades. We also work in an area with higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease and respiratory illness than the national average, alongside lower healthy life expectancy.
The local context matters. It shapes how we think about services and how we respond to the needs of our communities. Increasingly, we know that care cannot be designed around acute hospital activity alone. We need to focus on prevention, earlier intervention, stronger community links and better support for people living with long-term conditions.
The scale of activity across the trust is significant. In 2025-26, we recorded more than 1.5 million outpatient appointments, over 245,000 emergency department attendances, more than 53,000 inpatient stays and nearly 75,000 day-case procedures. Our community services also delivered more than half a million district nursing visits and almost 115,000 recovery-at-home visits.
Against this backdrop, we were keen to showcase a wide range of locally led innovation during the RCP college visit to Sunderland Royal Hospital. We highlighted our diagnostic and interventional nephrology service, alongside a postgraduate certificate in interventional nephrology developed with Newcastle University. We have also established an in-house assisted dialysis service, supporting the national ambition to increase the number of patients receiving dialysis at home.
Another important initiative is SPOT CKD, a £350,000 investment helping nephrologists optimise chronic kidney disease management in primary care. The programme is already working with 19 GP practices across Sunderland, bringing specialist expertise closer to patients and strengthening links between primary and secondary care.
We also highlighted strong referral-to-treatment performance in renal medicine and haematology, as well as a virtual osteoporosis multidisciplinary team integrated with the fracture liaison service to improve patient pathways and access to care.
In gastroenterology, we shared examples of high performance and service improvement. February 2026 benchmarking data showed that the trust ranked second in the region for both colonoscopy and upper gastrointestinal endoscopy services, while also achieving strong national rankings. Alongside this, the service has maintained a clear focus on training and workforce development.
Rehabilitation and geriatric medicine provided further examples of innovation across hospital and community settings. Colleagues discussed orthogeriatric medicine services, front-of-house frailty models, established community multidisciplinary teams and delirium services led by a nurse consultant across sites.
Achievements in this area include geriatrician-led dementia clinics, virtual wards, UROL-POPS and a ‘silver phone’ model that allows community teams to seek specialist advice before conveying patients to hospital. Together, these initiatives demonstrate our commitment to more proactive, joined-up care that helps patients receive support in the right place.
The visit also gave us space for honest discussion about areas where we want to go further, including research, discharge processes, variation across sites, virtual wards and neighbourhood-based care. Innovation is not only about celebrating success; it is also about identifying what needs to improve and creating the conditions for teams to work together.
Our stroke medicine and neurology services reflect the same approach. Stroke services are centred around a single-site model at Sunderland Royal Hospital, with good access to thrombolysis and neurorehabilitation. We are continuing to improve therapy provision, ambulance links and regional thrombectomy services. In neurology, we continue to deliver care across a broad range of specialist pathways, supported by strong regional links and referral-to-treatment performance, while workforce capacity remains an ongoing challenge.
Across every specialty, one theme is clear: innovation starts with people. It depends on clinicians who understand the needs of their communities, teams willing to test new approaches and organisations prepared to support collaboration across specialties, sites and sectors.
For us, the RCP visit was a valuable opportunity to share learning, reflect honestly on the challenges we face and highlight the practical solutions being developed by our teams. The work taking place in South Tyneside and Sunderland is a reminder that some of the most effective innovation is developed by teams responding to local needs with a clear focus on improving care for patients.
Dr Shaz Wahid
Executive medical director and consultant physician
