Student nurse wins national award
A student nurse from Basildon Hospital has won the 2020 Royal College of Nursing Institute (RCNi) nursing student award.
Temitope (Temi) Babajide, who has been a student nurse at Basildon Hospital for two and a half years and is a student at Anglia Ruskin University, won the award for her commitment to patient care and consistently going above and beyond for others.
Last year Temi undertook a 21-day nursing elective placement to Effia Nkwanta Regional Hospital in Ghana. She raised money to ship medical equipment and, in recognition of this, Basildon Hospital donated supplies in support of her efforts.
Once there, as part of a service improvement project, she gave a presentation on using gloves to nurses, colleagues and the wider team, adapting resources from a gloves awareness conference she had been to at home.
She helped run a sport event at a local orphanage and organised a widows’ event, which included a health check, empowerment session and free lunch. Through that screening, some patients received diagnoses of underlying conditions and are now receiving treatment.
Temi said: “My nursing training at Basildon Hospital has enabled me to work with incredible teams both here and abroad. This award is a great example of the ripple effect of the work nurses do and its impact on the community and our profession.
“I look forward to continuing to make a difference, developing myself and to growing as a nurse practitioner. I feel honoured that my work has been acknowledged and it’s amazing that I have been given this award.”
The 2020 RCNi Nurse Awards took place virtually, with Temi announced as winner in her category by actress Emilia Clarke. Temi is now finishing the last few weeks of her nurse training on the Acute Medical Unit at Basildon Hospital.
Temi undertook her placement with Work the Word, an organisation that facilitates elective placements in low-resource clinical settings around the world.