This award is an opportunity for patients, families, visitors and Trust colleagues to say ‘thank you – you made a difference’ to a member of staff or a team for anything (however small!) that helped make their experience of our services better.

The winner for July 2018 is:

Karen Patchett, Youth Offending Nurse, Youth Offending, Looked After Children’s Team, Luton

Karen was nominated by Augustina Williams for being a dedicated safeguarding practitioner who goes above and beyond her duties to ensure young people’s health needs are met. Her work with young people who are victims, vulnerable to victimisation or vulnerable to involvement as perpetrators through child sexual exploitation is invaluable. She has developed trusting relationships and created safe spaces in order that young people are able to disclose. Her work with parents around this sensitive issue has also helped one particular family and they wrote to her health managers saying how supportive her involvement had been. Karen’s role enables her to provide confidential advice to young people which helps them access services if needed and keeps them safe. This health practitioner status also enables Karen to discuss and challenge what healthy relationships look like as she covers issues such as understanding of consent etc.

Another area that Karen has made appositive impact is with Looked after Children placed in Luton from other Local Authority areas. She has facilitated them attending health needs assessments, dental, optical and Drs appointments and kept in close contact with LAC nurses in their home Authorities. Apart from the obvious health outcomes the impact of Karen’s practice has been the realisation for some young people that they are cared for – for one young person this seemed to be the first time he had received such unconditional care; their confidence about how to manage a health appointment has been developed so they are more ready to do this on their own.

We know that having health needs met and starting to see oneself as a person who is worthy of care and support is an important step to remodelling ones view of yourself and this is often a key turning point in offenders making the decision to be a new person and live up to the parts of themselves that they now see as worthy of care and respect. Karen’s dedication, care and diligence to safeguarding through ensuring young people’s health needs are met makes a significant impact toward this journey toward desistence from crime.

Karen Patchett  - a caring, diligent and dedicated health care practitioner for whom going the extra mile is daily business. The information above was submitted by Claire Dan Operations Manager Luton Youth Offending and Targeted Youth Service as nomination for the category of Health Carers Award for the event below for 23.06.18 http://www.hrnd.co.uk/2018/05/awards-ceremony-will-celebrate-woman.html 

Huge congratulations to Karen for winning this month’s award!

Other nominations this month included:

Sara Scotney and Amy Edwards, Clinical Systems Manager/Senior Programme Manager, Service Redesign

Sarah Saul nominated Sara and Amy as the DynamicHealth team has been going through an intense period of Service Redesign over the last 6-9 months. The last 4 months have seen all 4 SystemOne Units from each locality merge into one DynamicHealth Unit which improves efficiency in processes and joins up the Physiotherapy and specialist service on one unit to provide a more streamlined and integrated pathway of care. Boundaries are being pushed. Staff processes and historical ways of working are being challenged and Amy has driven the majority of this forward with staff, leaders and the unit. Her presence at meetings, her process mapping, her drilling down of data/performance/activity and her tenacity and resilience to keep pushing under the umbrella of fair and standard has proved remarkable in dropping the 18 week breaches, improving waiting times for the service and engaging staff along the journey.

Sara Scotney has seen ways of working which will improve processes, put in presets to improve time spent on activity, liaised with the service staff to drive better use of system one and maximizing its usage and improving staff knowledge on this. Sara and Amy supported each merge from start to finish, worked at weekends to put patients back onto the system, produced "how to" booklets so staff had reference guides, worked with Jenny Poole and Sarah to support/engage/drive staff along the new ways of working for massive service and patient benefit. Sarah nominated the two of them as they are a great team - both service redesign and clinical systems support DynamicHealth has been wishing for, for a few years but due to other pressures within the organisation they have not been a priority. However, now they can as a unit really see what "stopping the cutting down of the trees to sharpen the saw" means and the "taking a step out to analyse/look at other ways/how we can do better" has REALLY reaped rewards for staff/patients/unit/CCS and aided in recruitment, morale, collaboration, followership and reputation locally. We are very proud of Sara/Amy and the work they have done and know we couldn't have got where we are now without them and their commitment and support when times were tough. This is why we have nominated them for shine a light.

Sally Tilley, Health Visitor, 0-19 HCP (St Ives HV team)

Sally was nominated by Jo Smith after some amazing feedback from a service user where Sally's input literally transformed this family’s life!

“After 7 weeks of struggling and failing to breastfeed, I was resigned to expressing milk/using formula.

“However, I had a visit from Sally (HV); she asked to assess my babies feeding. I had seen so many advisors about BF that I was a bit reluctant! Thank goodness she took the time - on her way home at the end of the day to do a proper assessment because she discovered that my baby might have a tongue tie and referred us to have it repaired.

“We saw a lactation consultant. Within two minutes of a posterior tongue tie being cut my baby fed from the breast without nipple shields for the first time. He has been exclusively breastfed ever since with no further bottles and no more formula top ups and is gaining weight faster than ever. If Sally had not detected the problem it would not have been solved because I had lost hope of ever breastfeeding properly.

“If the TT had been recognised sooner it may have avoided this admission and 7 weeks of struggling because we suspected it was all due to this. I know that it is very hard to detect posterior tongue tie so would be great if there was more support for staff on understanding their impact, diagnosing and treating them. Overall I fell very lucky to live in St Neots where there are such brilliant support services for women who wish to breastfeed and I'm grateful to everyone that has helped up!”

Carol Mansfield, Advanced Paediatric Dietitian, Children's Dietetics, Cambridgeshire

Carol was nominated by Samantha Marshall as she is the "rock" of the team and over the last year particularly she has gone above and beyond to ensure children receive excellent dietetic care, despite severe staffing issues. Exceptionally organised and efficient, she takes the lead on training new members of staff. It is difficult to count the numbers of children and young people that she has helped over the years. Carol is not one to shout about her contribution but as a close colleague it would be difficult to imagine the team without her. I would like Carol to be acknowledged as an unsung hero within CCS.

Huge congratulations to everyone who was nominated this month!