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

East of England June 2026 region update

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

It's great to speak with you all again. We have been in post as regional co-chairs for several months now and it has been excellent to begin to build connections with you.

For this bulletin, we would like to focus on two exciting updates. The first, in keeping with the community focus of our last bulletin, is a Care Home Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) initiative currently underway. Second, we are delighted to announce an East of England 'Geriatrics 4 Residents' event.

In the hope of encouraging further collaborators to join the project, we include here an introduction to the Care Home AKI initiative from Dr Vivian Yiu, a nephrologist at the West Suffolk Hospital (WSH) and the East of England (EOE) renal network lead: 

“The East of England AKI working group is very keen to work with our geriatrician colleagues to improve the early detection and management of AKI in nursing homes, hopefully to be able to keep more residents from needing hospital stays and further deterioration.

Some of the initiatives include:

1. Support GPs to review high-risk patients (e.g. with CKD/ diabetes) to de-prescribe and have advanced care planning discussions

2. Support care home staff to recognise early signs of AKI and support hydration (particularly in acute illness)

3. Consider an information leaflet for managing kidney disease in a frail, older patient- particularly to help relatives

4. Provide education support for care home staff/GPs - both via the renal network (remote) and local (colleagues who do in reach into care homes)

I would be very keen to hear from geriatrician colleagues who would be interested in working with the EOE renal network/myself to develop and deliver some of these initiatives. Any suggestions for other ways which we could work together to support patients with frailty and kidney disease would also be very welcome. My email is: vivian.yiu@wsh.nhs.uk.”

We are also inviting attendees to our first regional Geriatrics 4 Residents event as co-chairs. This is intended for resident doctors across all regions interested in further exploring a career in Geriatric Medicine, particularly those about to apply for higher specialty training. 

This FREE whole day event will feature talks from the Regional Training Programme Director and geriatricians at different points in their careers, on applications, interviews, training and subspecialties. 

There will be a poster competition with prizes and certificates for presentations given. This is great for the CV and an excellent opportunity for budding geriatricians to showcase their work. The date is Monday 21 September 2026 and this will be an in-person only event at Addenbrooke's Hospital campus, Cambridge. Please book your free place here: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/5EpchCpd11

In this unseasonably hot weather, we would like to end with a news highlight from the BGS website: https://www.bgs.org.uk/heat-related-deaths-in-social-care-in-england-age-and-ageing-highlight

This study, published in Age and Ageing in April 2026, shows that during the July 2022 heatwave, nursing home deaths increased by 34.1% and residential care home deaths increased by 13.0%, compared to the same time period in the non-heatwave years. This gives a stark warning about the importance of heatwave preparedness in order to protect our most vulnerable patients. 

We are sure that all trusts have heatwave action plans in place for staff and patients alike. Please do reach out to us if you feel that heat or any other issues are adversely affecting your patients. We would also love to be able to champion your successes and promote best practice across the region, so do get in touch if you had anything you would like to share. 

Until our next update, 

Will and Fiona 

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.