Efforts made to improve patients’ experience at Walsall Manor Hospital’s Emergency Department – including speedier ambulance handover times – have earned its teams a national award.
Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust won the Performance Recovery Award category of the Health Service Journal (HSJ) awards at a ceremony attended by Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting.
This category recognised “teams and organisations innovating to deliver tangible improvements for staff, patients, and populations, as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
The Trust came out of Care Quality Commission special measures in summer 2019 as a result of care within the Emergency Department. It has since performed within the best decile nationally across the urgent and emergency care pathway, including, but not limited to, the GIRFT (Getting It Right First Time) Emergency Medicine Index, GIRFT Acute Medicine Index rates of same day emergency care and length of stay. This has been achieved in the context of a 21 per cent growth in Type1 ED attendances since 2019/20 compared to five per cent nationally.
And it has consistently seen the best timeliness of ambulance handovers within the West Midlands over the last three years, with more than 90 per cent of crews consistently being able to offload patients within 30 minutes. More importantly, the Trust is seeing improvements in a range of clinical outcomes for its patients.
Dr Asif Naveed, Clinical Director for Acute and Emergency Care at Walsall Healthcare, said: “We are so pleased and proud to have won this award, against some really strong competition.
“ED is an extremely challenging environment and we are all too aware of the potential for patients’ experience and health to be impacted if we are over occupied or ambulance handovers are delayed. The award is the result of us working together as a committed team to drive improvements, helped by the opening of our new Urgent and Emergency Care Centre last year which has significantly enhanced this clinical area for our patients.”
Dr Naveed said the department’s culture of professionalism and high standards was also a key element of its improvement and it is beginning to establish itself as a location of choice for Doctors in training.
Liz Slevin, ED and Acute Care Transformational Lead Nurse at the Trust, added: “This award is a real boost for our staff as it shows their commitment to innovate and lead improvement is making a difference, here in Walsall, as well as being more widely recognised.”
The awards ceremony was held in London last week, hosted by comedian Dara O’Briain, and spanned 26 categories, celebrating the dedication and innovation of NHS staff across the country.
Health and social care secretary Wes Streeting, speaking at the ceremony, told nominees their work created “inspiration.
Their success stories “give people hope and confidence that there are people who can show us what the future can look like in terms of innovation and new ways of working,” he said.