In late 2019, our historic Mildmay Hospital was facing closure. We fought hard to stay open, and the public got behind our #SaveMildmay campaign in huge numbers to help us lobby Parliament and the Secretary of State for Health.
Now, in May 2023, we have formally closed our campaign and can declare victory!
Mildmay Mission Hospital is no longer in danger of imminent closure, and we are delighted to say that our Save Mildmay Campaign has been an overwhelming success! We can never know what is around the corner (as we have all learned over the past three years), but we are still here, and we are making plans to develop our services and help even more people in the coming months and years.
A warm welcome to all those signatories of our #SaveMildmay petition who have continued to follow our story and have signed up to subscribe to our newsletter. Thank you so much for your continuing interest and support.
So today, we formally close off our petition of over 78,500 signatures on Change.org and end our campaign. To do so, here's a message to you from Geoff, our Chief Executive, who worked so hard along with all our clinical colleagues to care for our patients throughout the pandemic and to preserve the extraordinary, historic charity that is Mildmay:
“I would like to take the opportunity to thank all of our fantastic supporters who, for the past three and a half years as part of the Change.org Campaign, signed petitions, wrote letters to MPs, encouraged us, have stood up and shouted loudly where necessary and flown the Mildmay flag. Without your amazing support, we would not be where we are now.
Despite being at the point of imminent closure a couple of months earlier, since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, Mildmay Hospital has been operating at full capacity. Like our NHS partners, our waiting list for services is longer than it has ever been. In fact, in the autumn of 2022, we converted two disused bathrooms in our wards to increase the number of inpatient beds, and we are currently reviewing ways to increase our capacity even further.
As a specialist infectious disease hospital whose primary focus for over thirty years was HIV, we are now treating a wider range of patients discharged from NHS Acute Centres across London who are part of a rehabilitation pathway. We are also part of the detox pathway for homeless patients who have initially been treated at St Thomas' Hospital and are not yet ready to go into longer-term accommodation.
From January 2020, when we asked for your support to stop the hospital from closing to May 2023, when we realised that we had arrived (that is, we are relatively safe and able to make plans for the future), it has been a rollercoaster of a journey. So this will be my final message to all of you as part of this campaign; thank you so much - you did it!"
Geoff Coleman
CEO of Mildmay
We are archiving our Save Mildmay Campaign page, and it will no longer be updated (we hope!), but you will always find it here.