Improvement scheme raising patient care up for national award
A scheme that helps hospital staff to improve the care they provide to patients is up for a major national award.
The programme, run by the Quality Improvement team at Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, encourages staff, including nurses and healthcare support workers, to form and then apply ideas that make patient care better, on top of their daily duties and other improvements.
The programme that they run across Basildon, Broomfield and Southend hospitals has been shortlisted for the Quality Improvement Initiative of the Year category prize at the HSJ Patient Safety Awards 2024 in recognition of their successes in improving patient care and staff morale.
At Basildon Hospital the scheme worked with the renal unit to review staffing levels and see how working patterns could be improved for one of their services.
Linda Lio, Head of Nursing for the Renal Service, said: “The quality improvement process helped us to identify that we needed more staff for the Acute Dialysis service at Basildon Hospital. This quickly enabled us to change how we deployed our teams, meaning we can give safer care to our patients which made a real difference.”
The programme supported staff on a ward at Southend Hospital to identify patients who can be discharged sooner, which has more than halved the amount of time they spend in hospital.
The team also worked with a ward at Broomfield Hospital to give more intensive support to patients with their eating and drinking. Patients felt that care was better as a result, and different parts of the ward team were able to work more closely together.
Carley Gibbens, Associate Clinical Director for Improvement at the Trust, said: “We are so proud that our ward quality improvement programme has been shortlisted for the HSJ Patient Safety Award. What works about this scheme is that it is clinically led, as ward staff know the best way to improve patient care. This year we’re in the process of expanding our programme to many more departments across our hospitals to continue to improve our services and patient safety, and I want to thank all the wards who have been a part of the programme so far.”
The awards ceremony takes place in September in Manchester, where category winners will be announced.