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Nwicker60
29-Jun-12, 12:14
Health formula from NHS Highland "an innovative concept"

FOR the second year running, NHS Highland has picked up a prestigious national award. NHS Highland’s Clinical Advisory Group won the top award for their work on developing clinical infrastructure “Growing Quality from the Roots Up”.
The winners were announced in Glasgow on Friday (22nd June 2012) at the leading health event in Scotland. The Group, which was established last year, provides expert advice to senior managers across NHS Highland on drugs and treatments to ensure they are both clinically and cost effective.
Denise Coia, Chair, Healthcare Improvement Scotland who judged the posters in this category said: “This is an innovative concept and will really improve the service that the Board delivers to its population.”
Noelle O’Neill, Public Health Scientist, and also a member of the Core Clinical Advisory Group, designed and presented the poster. Noelle commented: “The poster generated a lot of interest and I was delighted to receive the award on behalf of the Group (photo below). The poster was deliberately simple in its design to clearly emphasise the strong, inclusive and transparent decision-making process of this Group.”
Elaine Mead, Chief Executive for NHS Highland, said: “I’m delighted that our staff are getting national recognition for some of the quality improvement work they are leading on. The examples we put forward reflect our whole ethos of improving quality of services and care for patients. The work is peer reviewed and so it means a lot to the teams. We are all part of the NHS family and it is really important that we share our work as well as learn from others.”
Work being led by senior doctors, nurses, pharmacists across Raigmore, Belford, Caithness General and Lorn and Islands Hospital was also highly commended under categories of Safe and Effective.
In the safe category, NHS Highland was recognised as leading work to improve the assessment for the risk of Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) for patients who are admitted to hospital.
Andy Longmate, National Clinical Lead for Patient Safety and Quality said: “This is a fantastic aim, which will improve high levels of reliability and outcomes for patients.”
Mary Anne Gillies NHS Highland’s Manager for the Patient Safety Programme who attended the event said: “As a team we are really delighted to get this recognition. It reflects a huge amount of work by many staff pulling together to improve care of patients when they come into hospital.”
Work to improve prescribing of antimicrobial antibiotics in the surgical division in Raigmore Hospital was highlighted as comprehensive work. Getting prescribing right is a complex area but is crucial to reducing risks of getting infections such as Clostridium difficile.
Commenting on the Highland work, Gerry Marr, Chief Executive, NHS Tayside said: “This is a comprehensive cycle of audit of guidelines, education and feedback of data which is really driving improvements.”
Over 450 poster abstracts were submitted to the leading health event in Scotland. These submissions were reviewed by a panel of experts and from these just 140 were selected to be displayed at the event. Winners were presented for five categories Safe, Effective, Efficient, Person-centred and infrastructure, and in each category two posters were given the status of highly commended.