We are celebrating awards success after one of our teams scooped an award at a prestigious healthcare event last night (Monday 18 September).

The ‘advocacy for autistic people in mental health inpatient settings’ pilot won in the Mental Health Safety Improvement category at the Health Service Journal (HSJ) Patient Safety Awards, which recognise safety, culture and positive experience in patient care.

The team worked with Advocacy Focus for 14 months, engaging with autistic inpatients across our hospitals to gather the views, wishes and experiences of people surrounding their care and treatment and their experience of advocacy. These were collected to shape how inpatient services meet the needs of autistic people and how effective advocacy services are.

Interim Chief Nurse and Quality Officer, Julie Anne Murray, said:

“We are thrilled to have won at these important awards, particularly in the Mental Health Safety Improvement category, which recognises how we are continuing to champion patient safety. Our success really reflects our collaborative efforts and the dedication of colleagues to implement so many incredible services and initiatives to help support our patients.

We are committed to delivering improvements for the people who use our services and to be singled out amongst the other incredible nominees is a wonderful achievement.  This is a welcome boost to our teams and will add to our continued efforts to improve our services.”

Lancashire and South Cumbria’s Resilience Hub, which was launched in response to Covid-19 to support public sector workers and their immediate families with the psychological impact of the pandemic, was also highly commended in the ‘Staff Wellbeing Initiative of the Year’ award.

A record-breaking 515 entries were received for the awards, with 209 organisations, projects and individuals making it to the final shortlist.

We was shortlisted for five awards. A full shortlist can be found here.

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