AFTER being shortlisted for the Health Service Journal Awards last year, the Great Western Hospital is celebrating further national recognition of its staff in 2013.

With two finalists for the national Patient Safety Awards 2013 and a finalist for the Student Nursing Times Awards who also recently won a British Journal of Nursing (BJN) Award, the Trust is pleased its staff are receiving recognition for their hard work.

Radiology sister Alice Bevan won the BJN Oncology and Haematology Nurse of the Year Award at the end of March. The awards recognise the contribution individuals make towards the nursing profession and celebrate clinical excellence and innovation.

She has also been shortlisted for Student Nurse of the Year: Post-registration in the Student Nursing Times Awards 2013.

Alice, who has recently achieved a masters degree with distinction at UWE, was nominated for both awards for designing and leading a project to improve the quality of care for patients with palliative care needs, specifically those suffering from recurrent malignant ascites (caused by cancer, malignant acites is the build-up of fluid in the abdominal cavity).

Alice said: “It is a great privilege to have been nominated for both awards, and I was very pleased to win the BJN Award last month, I couldn’t believe it.

“The service is unique to the best of my knowledge. There are other day case services in existence, but they tend to take up the whole day, whereas we complete the procedure in two hours.”

Adegbayi Ukoha and Andrew Stanton have been selected as finalists for the Patient Safety Awards 2013, which aim to recognise the best patient safety initiatives so that they can be shared across the health service.

Governance pharmacist Adegbayi Ukoha is a finalist in the Improving Safety in Medicines Management category. This is for a project based on reducing the potential risk of harm to patients due to missed doses of critical medicines.

Adegbayi and the Medicines Governance team worked closely with other staff to introduce a range of measures, including carrying out a rolling missed doses ward audit program helping to identify the causes of missed doses and solutions, and developing an online missed doses avoidance support tool.

The project has been seen a reduction in the number of missed doses in the Trust and a shift in culture, with an increased awareness among nursing and pharmacy staff of their role in missed doses avoidance.

Adegbayi said: “The Medicines Governance team and I are very pleased to have been shortlisted for this award.

“We have made a lot of progress in considerably reducing the incidents of missed doses in the Trust.

“I think the nomination has helped raise the profile of what we are doing which will help us to further our progress and sustain this change.”

Dr Andrew Stanton, consultant in physician in respiratory medicine, is a finalist in the Patient Safety in Diagnosis category of the Patient Safety Awards 2013. This is for his work as part of the Swindon Pleural Service.

He said: “I am delighted to be a finalist for the Patient Safety Awards; it is great to be able to raise the profile of the innovative work we are doing and share our experiences and findings.”

Winners of the Student Nursing Times Awards will be announced on May 1 and winners of the Patient Safety Awards will be announced on July 9.