East End’s pioneering GP ‘Sir’ Sam Everington is knighted in New Year’s Honours
Dr Sam Everington... knighted in New Year's Honours - Credit: TH GPs' CG
A campaigning East End GP fighting to keep the NHS out of private hands has been knighted in the New Year Honours.
Dr Sam Everington, who runs St Andrew’s Clinic in Bromley-by-Bow and chairs the Tower Hamlets GPs’ award-winning Commissioning Group, gets the knighthood from the Queen “for services to primary care” announced tonight.
“This is a great honour for Sam, for the NHS and the community,” the Commissioning group’s chief officer Jane Milligan said.
“Sam’s focus is and always will be the health of the people of the East End, with his driving force, his love for the NHS, his dedication to local people and his passion for improving services.”
The Bromley-by-Bow Centre which Dr Everington—now ‘Sir Sam’ Everington—helped set up has pioneered tele-care, video consultations and self-care that is being copied across the country.
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NHS Tower Hamlets, which brings together 36 practices and 280 GPs, was named ‘Commissioning Group of the Year’ in the prestigious Health Service Journal awards in November for projects such as the ‘urgent care’ triage system he set up in the A&E at the Royal London Hospital and for developing diabetic care packages enabling patients to self-manage their condition.
His knighthood citation released at 10.30 tonight speaks of Sam as “a cutting-edge innovator” working among some of the poorest in the country.
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It adds: “He pioneered the Bromley-by-Bow centre which is now serving as a model nationally and internationally.
“Beyond his own practice, he has improved health services across east London from the transition between GP services and acute care in one of London’s poorest boroughs, while delivering the highest rate of MMR immunisation in London.”
But Dr Everington has also been at the frontline of the political struggle to protect the NHS.
He was the first GP to take a stand and call on David Cameron to scrap the Health & Social Care Bill two years ago. His letter to the Prime Minister was followed by others from GPs across the country.
He also took part in a picket in 2008 against the handover of St Paul’s Way medical centre in Bow Common involving 120 protesting doctors, nurses and patients.
Dr Everington was attending a top-level BMA meeting on the day of the 7/7 London bombings in July, 2005, when he rushed out to treat the injured and dying at Tavistock Square.
