Teams at The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust are celebrating after scooping two national HSJ Patient Safety Awards for work improving safety in maternity care and end-of-life care.
The HSJ Patient Safety Awards recognise individuals and teams working to make care safer across the NHS and wider health and care sector. This year's awards attracted 427 entries, with 217 projects shortlisted across 25 categories and 135 judges involved in selecting the winners.
The Trust picked up two of the three awards it was shortlisted for at the annual awards ceremony held at Telford International Centre last night (28 September). The wins recognise work which has dramatically reduced periods of escalation within maternity services and transformed the way palliative and end-of-life care is provided to patients in intensive care.
The Trust won the Maternity, Midwifery and Neonatal Safety Initiative of the Year category for its Reducing Regional Escalation within the Acute Maternity Setting project.
The programme brought teams together to look at the whole maternity pathway rather than tackling individual pressures in isolation. Improvements were made across maternity triage, induction of labour, elective caesarean section discharge and the way capacity and patient flow are managed across the service.
As a result, the amount of time the maternity unit spent in escalation fell from an average of 117 hours each month to almost zero, alongside improvements in triage times, induction of labour and staff experience.
Presenting the award, judges described the work as: “An outstanding example of whole system quality improvement demonstrating how significant and sustainable safety gains can be achieved through thoughtful redesign of existing services. The initiative combined cultural change, workforce empowerment and operational improvement with clear and measurable outcomes creating capacity and improving staff experience without requiring additional investment. “
Accepting the award, Group Director of Midwifery, Claire Macdiarmid said, “Winning these awards is a wonderful recognition of the commitment, creativity and determination of our teams to make a real difference to the safety and experience of the people we care for.
“What makes me particularly proud is the way colleagues have challenged themselves to do things differently, worked across traditional boundaries and kept families at the heart of everything they do.
“These awards are a fantastic opportunity to celebrate the progress we have made and, most importantly, the people behind it.”
The Trust's second win came in the Palliative and End of Life Safety Initiative of the Year category for the Integrating End-of-Life Care into Intensive Care Practice project.
Recognising that nationally, between 15 – 20 per cent of patients admitted to intensive care units die, the Dudley team set out to make sure that spotting when a patient may be approaching the end of their life was embedded into everyday intensive care practice through the Gold Standards Framework.
The structured approach has helped staff identify patients earlier, improve advance care planning and enabled the team to provide more personalised care for patients, while strengthening collaboration between intensive care and specialist palliative care teams.
The work has also enabled more patients to leave intensive care and be cared for in their preferred place where clinically appropriate.
In 2023, the Trust's intensive care unit became the first in the UK to achieve Gold Standards Framework accreditation, with the approach since influencing practice beyond intensive care and being shared more widely across the UK.
Celebrating the win, Louis Harpham-Lockyer, Consultant Palliative Medicine, said: “Winning this award is a fantastic recognition of the work that our intensive care teams have done to make high-quality end-of-life care an integral part of intensive care practice. Critically ill patients and their families can face incredibly difficult and uncertain situations and recognising when priorities may be changing is an important part of safe, personalised care.”
“What makes me particularly proud is that this has not been creating a separate process or adding another layer of work. It has been about empowering the teams who already care for their patients to recognise change earlier, support better conversations and work together to ensure care reflects what is important to each individual patient. Seeing this recognition nationally via the HSJ Patient Safety Awards is a wonderful achievement to everyone involved.”
Awarding the team, judges said: “This initiative embedded training and empowerment of existing staff so they were able to take a proactive approach to palliative care enabling improvements to preferred place of care and ceiling of care, built on a great partnership between nursing, medical, palliative and intensive care teams its reached other wards and a national audience”
Diane Wake, Group Chief Executive at The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, said: “To win two national patient safety awards in one evening is a tremendous achievement and one our teams should be extremely proud of.
“Both projects show what can be achieved when our colleagues are given the opportunity to challenge the way we work, collaborate across professional boundaries and focus on making care better and safer for our patients and their families.
“I would like to congratulate everyone involved, as well as our team shortlisted in the data and analytics category. To have three projects recognised nationally and to bring two awards home to Dudley is something we should all celebrate.”