Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility Annual report 2024 - Guy's & St Thomas' Foundation

Annual report 2024

21 January 2025
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8 min read

At Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation, we are building the foundations of a society that helps everyone stay healthier for longer. During 2023/24 we have made significant progress towards achieving our vision in our home of Lambeth and Southwark and beyond.

A person abseils against a sunset backdrop on the Thames.

At Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation, we are building the foundations of a society that helps everyone stay healthier for longer. During 2023/24 we have made significant progress towards achieving our vision in our home of Lambeth and Southwark and beyond.

In 2023/24 we remained focused on:

  • Supporting patient care and the wellbeing of staff across the Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust’s hospitals and community sites.
  • Using our endowment to deliver financial returns and positive impact on health.
  • Investing in our people and the systems and processes needed to achieve our vision.
  • Supporting our partners in Lambeth, Southwark and beyond to work with communities to tackle complex health issues prevalent in urban and diverse areas.

In 2023/24

£37.7m

in direct charitable expenditure, and £17.8m distributed through our three NHS charities.

£18.8m

distributed through Impact on Urban Health.

£9.3m

raised through fundraising for our three NHS charities.

I would like to thank our amazing team, Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and the many partners who contribute invaluable insights and expertise to strengthen our impact.

Laurie Lee, CEO. Photograph by Alick Cotterill
Laurie Lee, CEO

Message from our CEO, Laurie Lee

I take very seriously the responsibility of leading Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation. It has existed in various forms for 500 years and has a mission to ensure everyone has the same chance of a long, healthy life. It is my privilege to lead, support and challenge a talented team who work tirelessly to realise our collective vision of a society that helps everyone stay healthier for longer.

I was delighted to be appointed as the permanent CEO in March 2024, having joined the Foundation as Interim CEO in April 2023. From my very first week, it was clear to me both the urgency of our mission and the impact the Foundation is having across every area of its work.

Health problems within our local communities have continued to rise and demands on the NHS have become more acute. But we are meeting this challenge.

In total, this year we committed £37.7m to the work of our three NHS charities and Impact on Urban Health. We awarded charitable grants totalling £28.1m, together with a further £9.6m of contract and other commitments.

Highlights from our Impact on Urban Health programmes included London Mayor Sadiq Khan citing our cost-benefit analysis in his pledge to provide free school meals for all London primary school pupils for a further four years. We also launched a £3m strategic partnership with Black Thrive Global. This is a practical demonstration of our commitment to reducing the racial inequity in health outcomes in South East London.

Our three NHS charities celebrated both funding and fundraising achievements this year. Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity invested £1.4m in a pioneering population health management hub, and Guy’s Cancer Charity funded cutting-edge equipment to deliver targeted radiotherapy to people with multiple brain tumours. Evelina London Children’s Charity raised over £100,000 through Evelina’s Incredibles, its first Christmas fundraising campaign.

This year, we have also grown our capacity to manage investments in-house. This new approach means we are better able to achieve the dual goals we set for our endowment – delivering financial returns and health impact.

Supported by the Board of Trustees, our Executive Team and brilliant colleagues across the Foundation, I have focused on delivering five key priorities during 2023/24. Each will help us to transform lives now, while taking the long-term view needed to build the foundations of a healthier, more equitable society:

  • Creating an inclusive, effective leadership and culture. To succeed in our mission, we need to draw on a broad range of perspectives at all levels of our organisation. Having high performing and inclusive leaders will help us to get to where we want to be. Therefore, I am delighted to have welcomed Peter Babudu to the Foundation as Executive Director of Impact on Urban Health and Emma Davies as Chief Investment Officer.
  • Supporting better patient care and staff wellbeing at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. With our new charities’ strategy in place, and thanks to our ever-growing family of donors, we proudly continued our work with the Trust to deliver better healthcare for all.
  • Ensuring our effectiveness and sustainability. We have improved our processes and policies to support our organisation, which has grown significantly over the last five years. We have big, long-term ambitions. To achieve impact at scale, we have built new platforms to support our people and partners and allow us to work effectively.
  • Making the biggest impact we can on urban health. Through Impact on Urban Health, we continued to collaborate with partners and communities to tackle health inequity in Lambeth and Southwark. During 2023/24, we took time to reflect on what we have learnt so far and refocused our efforts on tackling social factors that drive poor and inequitable health in cities.
  • Embedding Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. We set out to create an even more inclusive culture: one that would make everyone feel they belong and enable them to thrive. We published a revised DEI strategy and, crucially, committed to allocating resources to make sure we can do what we said we are going to do.

Having seen everything we have achieved this year, I am optimistic about the Foundation’s future. I would like to thank our amazing team, Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and the many partners who contribute invaluable insights and expertise to strengthen our impact.

There are undoubtedly challenges ahead but I believe that together we can do what is needed to help everyone to stay healthier, for longer.

Laurie Lee
Chief Executive

Laurie Lee, CEO, Photograph by Alick Cotterill
Laurie Lee sits at a table (watching a speaker) with staff at the Guy's & St Thomas' Foundation offices, in Southwark. Photograph by Alick Cotterill