The Northern Health and Social Care Trust has hosted its first Sharing Excellence Awards. The awards highlight staff achievements which have improved services for patients and clients.

Winning top place in the Northern Trust Excellence Awards was the Podiatry team in the Antrim and Ballymena area for its Service Improvement Project. The Trust asked service users how the Podiatry service could be improved. This has led to various improvements within the service including the introduction of partial booking to increase service efficiency, evening clinics were introduced and extension to contact periods where patients can ring for appointments. These are three improvements which resulted in nobody waiting longer than 13 weeks for treatment.

These service improvements have now been applied across the Northern Trust area with all podiatry patients benefitting from the service improvements.

Other projects highlighted at the event were: Nurse Practitioner Led Family Planning Clinic; Effective People Make Effective Organisations - The Medical Secretarial Handbook; From Here to There – Transition through Education to Adult Life for Young People with a Disability; Catering Services – Consulting, Involving and Informing Users; and the H.U.N.N.I Breastfeeding Peer Support Project - A Collaborative Approach to Working with Mums for Mums.

The winning project in the poster presentation category was the Child’s Voice at Child Protection Case Conferences. Other poster presentations included: Nurse Led Bowel Management Service; Community Mental Health Teams – Developing Services for Patients; Development of a Medical Assessment Unit as part of the Emergency Care Pathway; Antrim Hospital Children’s Weight Management Clinic and Fit Families Scheme; Angina Outreach Programme and Managing Laboratory Workload by a Minimum Restesting Interval Approach.

Jim Stewart, Chairman of the Northern Trust was one of the judges. He praised the staff for their dedication in improving the quality of care provided by the Trust and said,

“Quality is important to staff, and that is evident from the interest in this event. Submissions were of high quality and provide further evidence of the work being undertaken by staff on a day-to-day basis to improve service quality whether they are involved in direct patient/client care or work in support services.

“I would like to thank staff for their continuing hard work and efforts to provide better quality services”.

Jim Stewart, Chairman, Northern Health and Social Care Trust; Mervyn Rankin, Non Executive Director, Northern Health and Social Care Trust and Hazel Baird, Head of Governance, Northern Health and Social Care Trust present Graeme Orr, Podiatry Sector Manager, Northern Health and Social Care Trust with his award for winning the Oral presentation category of the Sharing Excellence Awards.

Jim Stewart, Chairman, Northern Health and Social Care Trust presents John Fyfe, Assistant Director Child and Family Care, Northern Health and Social Care Trust and Amber McCloughlin, Child Protection Nurse Specialist, Northern Health and Social Care Trust with their award for winning the Poster presentation category of the Sharing Excellence Awards.