Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust (GOSH) is launching the first ever public consultation on its future, and asks members of the Asian Community to play their part. The major consultation, which is part of its application to become a Foundation Trust, will run from 27th February to 26th May 2006. 38% of the hospital's inpatients currently come from black and ethnic minority groups.

The vision for the GOSH Foundation trust is:

• to help more children, to offer care in a more comfortable and convenient way,
• to work with others to improve children's health and well-being,
• to involve patients and their families more in designing and improving services
• to draw on our research strength and the innovation of our staff to develop new techniques, new services, and new ways of delivering care.

GOSH Chief Executive, Dr Jane Collins, said: "Great Ormond Street is committed to providing the best service possible to the 100,000 children we see every year. Becoming a Foundation Trust will help us listen better to the people that matter - our patients, their families and our staff, and will help us move more quickly to where we want to go in the future. We are asking for feedback on our plans from all those who have an interest in children's health. We want you to help us plan for our future."

GOSH is providing the adult consultation document in ten community languages and is piloting the children's leaflet in four of the most frequently used community languages. The languages are Arabic, Turkish, Bengali, Somali, Urdu, Greek, Punjabi, French, Albanian,. Portuguese.

If you would like to get involved there is information for adults on www.gosh.nhs.uk/foundation and for children and young people on www.talk2gosh.nhs.uk. Or you can contact our Foundation Trust team by phone on 020 7762 6761, or by email on foundation@gosh.nhs.uk.

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