UHNM wins two HSJ Patient Safety Awards
University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust (UHNM) is proud to announce it has won two HSJ Patient Safety Awards.
Patients on the Older Adult wards at the Royal Stoke University Hospital are benefitting from bespoke activities aimed at maintaining mobility, led by a team of Diversional Therapists. And now the team behind the project have been awarded ‘Patient Safety Pilot Project of the
Year’.
Whilst staff in UHNM’s Critical Care Unit took home the ‘Harnessing a Human Factors Approach to Improve Patient Safety’ award after adopting a new safety management system to identify and reduce risks for staff and patients.
Claire de Klerk, Senior Sister for Quality and Safety in UHNM’s Critical Care Unit said: “We have focussed on our quality improvement journey to improve the safety and learning culture of the department. We aimed to improve psychological safety and improve the multidisciplinary team working to create the environment that enabled the team to pro-actively manage risk. By a Safety Management System approach and embracing human factors, interventions and changes have been made to improve patient and staff safety. Staff feel able to speak up and make suggestions to improve care, and we now focus on developing controls and assurance for key risks.
“As a team we are overwhelmed to have won a HSJ Patient Safety Award to showcase the work that we have been doing. There has been a huge commitment from the multidisciplinary team on Critical Care in the last few years using continuous quality improvement tools to understand how to improve the way we work, making the patients and staff safer. We continue to look at human factors and create opportunities to share and develop processes across the team minimising risk. It’s great to have a team willing to try new things and we are incredibly proud of this.”
Jill Bogucki, Critical Care Matron said: “To be shortlisted for a HSJ Patient Safety Award was amazing, but for the team to win was incredible. We were so surprised as we were up against eight other NHS Trusts in our category, all of which were very deserving. I am incredibly proud of everyone involved within the working groups and the wider team, we have truly special people working in Critical Care that are simply committed to improving and driving forward innovation.”
As well as winning the ‘Patient Safety Pilot Project of the Year’ award, the Diversional Therapy team in Older Adults were also shortlisted in the ‘Improving Care for Older People Initiative of the Year’ category.
Lee-ann Boardman, Matron for Older Adults at UHNM said: “The ambition of this project was to create a team of Diversional Therapists that would work alongside our nursing teams on the Older Adults inpatient wards to assist with planning and promoting patient activities, to engage patients and encourage them to maintain mobility.
"The Diversional Therapist role has been pivotal in providing an environment for our patients whereby activities are at hand to promote patient independence, enhance their mobility and to encourage and assist their recovery. Activities are tailored on patient requirements and play an active role in reconditioning our patients and advocates UHNM’s 'Sit Up, Get Dressed, Keep Moving' campaign with the overall aim to improve patient experience, maintain patient ability, promote independence, and support a reduction in inpatient falls within older adults.”
She added: “Just to have been shortlisted for the two awards was amazing, for our team go through the experience, but to have actually have won was phenomenal. It shows the impact the Diversional Therapists are having, not only from a data perspective, but also the experience of patients and staff, because the staff love their jobs. The team don’t realise how good they are, and impact they are having, and I hope that this national recognition is helping them to realise how fantastic they are.”