As of writing (May 2023), Mildmay Mission Hospital is no longer in danger of closure, and we are delighted to declare 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 delighted to be making plans to develop our services and help even more people in the coming months and years.
So this is our final update as we formally close off our petition, and 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
Chief Executive Officer
May 2023
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The #SaveMildmay Campaign
Our campaign to save Mildmay Mission Hospital from closure
In late 2019, the historic Mildmay Hospital was facing closure. We fought hard to stay open, and the public got behind our #SaveMildmay campaign to lobby Parliament and the Secretary of State for Health.
Now, in May 2023, we have formally closed our campaign and declared victory!
We now look forward to many more years of delivering healthcare to those in greatest need.
You did it!
In December 2021, we were informed by the London NHS Commissioners (the five ICS’s and the Healthy London Partnership) that our contract to provide medical step-down care for homeless patients across the capital has been extended until JUNE 2023.
The journey has been challenging but with a huge amount of help from our partners such as Pathway, the Royal London Hospital, the East London Foundation Trust and many others, we have together made it a success. A big thank you from all of our staff to those commissioners who have placed their confidence in Mildmay.
A special thanks to our wonderful MP, Rushanara Ali, for her unceasing work to help protect Mildmay from closure and to ensure our future, and to the Health Ministers who listened.
We are continuing to work with all our stakeholders to find a permanent solution for our HIV care and our other services, beyond 2023.
The campaign
Due to NHS funding pressures, the doors might close at Mildmay - London’s only HIV hospital, made famous by Diana, Princess of Wales when she visited regularly in the 1980s and 90s.
Prince Harry, continuing his mother's passion, opened Mildmay’s new hospital in 2015 and it remains the only specialist hospital in Europe providing neurological rehabilitation for people with HIV.
Despite medical advances in the treatment of HIV and AIDS since the disease first came to the public’s attention in the 1980s, there are still a significant number of HIV patients in urgent need of the services Mildmay provides.
NHS doctors say that this treatment will be required for years to come and they want to keep referring patients to us.
Patients living with HIV might lose their vital specialist services if the controversial closure of Mildmay Mission Hospital goes ahead
Media coverage of the #SaveMildmay Campaign, both in print, TV and online, has been incredibly helpful helping us share our story.
The Campaign was picked up by Reuters, which meant that #SaveMildmay went global, with our story being reported as far away as Canada and Taiwan.
We were set to deliver our petition to Downing Street on March 25 2020, but circumstances changed as the UK rapidly succumbed to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have been granted several temporary contract extensions since then but are campaigning for a permanent solution that secures Mildmay's survival.
"I do not live in the London area,
but I want to continue support for Mildmay Hospital.
I am a retired GP. I am aware of the problems of people who
are in hospital, but unable to live independently and for whom it is difficult to find suitable accommodation. Of course, Mildmay is much more than that; it has done pioneering work for HIV patients nearing the end of their lives as well as rehabilitation for many other conditions.
This is an era of centralisation of hospitals, and often there is good reason for that, but smaller hospitals, albeit with links to big hospitals, are needed as well. Not least, patients like the smaller units. Hospices are a good example."
~ Anonymous
Even though treating patients at Mildmay actually costs less than NHS hospitals, and its highly skilled doctors, nurses and therapists are experts in specialist HIV care, sick patients are not being transferred from London’s NHS hospitals and are potentially blocking beds that are urgently needed by other patients.
The cost of keeping Mildmay open, around £5m a year, is a tiny fraction of the overall NHS budget, and the cost of treating HIV patients in other parts of the NHS are more expensive.
In 2020, doctors, patients, MPs and campaigners called on the Government to grant Mildmay enough funding for another year, while new sources of income could be found.
A (temporary) reprieve
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mildmay has been granted a temporary contract extension until the end of March 2022 and continues to play its part in helping to ease the burden on NHS hospitals.
Mildmay Hospital is now admitting both HIV and step-down homeless patients (on our Homeless Pathway, piloted in 2020).
This has given us the opportunity to treat people who are homeless or rough-sleeping as well as continuing to care for HIV patients as we have been doing for over 30 years.
We are still lobbying MPs and government ministers to persuade them that Mildmay’s unique services should be commissioned directly by NHS England like other specialist services already are, but time is running out.
Mildmay is a charity providing NHS services and not an NHS Trust. When we run out of money, we will simply have to close Mildmay Hospital.