From emergency medicine and cancer treatment to maternity care and diagnostics, thousands of NHS workers at Kettering General Hospital continue to serve patients across Kettering, Corby and the wider North Northamptonshire area.
Behind the doors of Kettering General Hospital, healthcare is rarely quiet.
Every day doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants, porters, cleaners, radiographers, laboratory staff, midwives and countless other NHS workers arrive for another shift knowing that they may be dealing with people experiencing some of the most frightening and vulnerable moments of their lives.
For the communities of Kettering, Corby and surrounding towns, the hospital is much more than a collection of wards and treatment rooms. It is one of the central pillars of local healthcare.
Kettering General Hospital provides acute services for people across North Northamptonshire and South Leicestershire. Around 5,000 people work for the hospital, making it one of Northamptonshire’s largest employers.
The scale of the work is considerable.
According to the hospital, its Accident and Emergency department sees around 255 patients every day. More than 360,000 outpatient appointments take place each year, alongside approximately 37,000 inpatient admissions, 44,000 day cases and around 3,200 births. The hospital has more than 500 beds.
Those figures tell us how busy Kettering General is.
What they cannot properly describe is the human work behind them.
A nurse reassuring somebody frightened about an operation does not appear in a spreadsheet.
Neither does the doctor who stays calm while relatives desperately wait for news, the healthcare assistant helping an elderly patient wash and dress, the porter taking somebody to a scan, or the housekeeper making sure a hospital environment remains clean and safe.
Yet all of them form part of the machinery that keeps the hospital functioning.
