East of England

Region overview

The East of England region covers the area including:

  • Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
  • Norfolk and Waveney
  • Suffolk and North East Essex
  • Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes
  • Hertfordshire and West Essex
  • Mid and South Essex

Meet East of England BGS members

  • BGS members can join our members directory allowing them to connect with other healthcare professionals in their region.
     
  • The forum is free to access for all health professionals with a BGS web account. You can access it via the BGS app. Use the forum to discuss older people's healthcare by theme (e.g. dementia) or topic (e.g. workforce). The forum also allows you to ask questions, or help provide answers to other professionals. It is a forum where health professionals can ask seek help, offer support to others or share their successes. Find out more on the forum information page.

Get involved

There are multiple ways to get involved with your BGS region.

  • Submit content for your regional e-bulletin. The BGS sends a tailored quarterly e-bulletin to each of its six England regions. As the region areas are so vast, you can provide valuable support by sharing updates on what’s happening in your own hospital or Trust. Please email your Co-Chairs with updates.
     
  • Help to plan our online events and webinars. By joining the planning committee, you will have the opportunity to help create programme content, source speakers and support on the day. This will help to enable colleagues to improve the delivery of high-quality healthcare to older people. Please email your region Co-Chairs to express your interest.

No content associated with the East of England Group found.

East of England Officers

BGS East of England Region Update March 2026

Our Region Co-Chairs share an update every quarter, highlighting key developments, successes, and priorities from across their region.

We are delighted, as your new regional co-chairs, to formally say “hello” in our first quarterly update. We both have strong ties to the region, having completed our higher specialty training here, and we look forward to meeting many of you over the coming year.

We recognise that clinical practice can often feel quite isolated amid day-to-day operational pressures, particularly across such a large geographical area. In each update, we aim to focus on a particular theme and showcase examples of positive work happening for our older patients. We hope this helps facilitate the exchange of ideas and offers solutions to local challenges that you and your departments may also be facing.

Our focus in this update is Community and Interface Geriatrics. This has been a key focus in the latest NHS Ten Year Plan for England, with an emphasis on proactive multidisciplinary care and shifting specialist services beyond hospitals and into the community. We would like to highlight two excellent initiatives: one at Ipswich Hospital (East Suffolk and North Essex Foundation Trust) and the other at Addenbrooke’s Hospital (Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust).

At Ipswich Hospital, daily frailty clinics run within the Frailty Assessment Base (FAB), a one-stop service including physiotherapy, specialist pharmacy, imaging, diagnostics and other on-demand multidisciplinary services such as dietetics. Additional GLINT (Geriatric Liaison into Integrated Neighbourhood Teams) clinics operate across three neighbourhood team footprints, with domiciliary visits available for frailer patients.

Their virtual frailty ward enables intravenous treatments such as antibiotics and diuretics through both step-up and step-down pathways. A consultant “hot phone” also supports these services. Their frailty front-door service, recently strengthened by a nurse consultant, sees around 150 patients a month and has saved an estimated 600 bed days over the winter.

At Addenbrooke’s Hospital, the EnRICH project (Enhanced Reviews in Care Homes) is a geriatrician-led interface service covering 11 care homes across Cambridgeshire. Residents are reviewed proactively in the community with in-reach support during admissions. In its first 12 months, the service has achieved a 23% reduction in unplanned emergency admissions and a 32% reduction in length of stay, saving over 3,000 bed days.

We would be very happy to put you in touch with those involved in these initiatives. Our contact details can be found on our bio pages. Please do get in touch to share successes or challenges from your own services, and we look forward to communicating again in our next quarterly update.