Efforts to Improve Patient Safety and Care Recognised in National Health Awards

MAIDENHEAD, UK, For Immediate Release,20^th November 2018 – AbbVie, a global biopharmaceutical company, today announced the winners of its 2018 ‘Big Ideas for Better Health’ Awards, held at The House of Commons in London. The awards, which were presented by Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, were open to the NHS, Health and Social Care organisations and Patient Organisations. The awards aim to recognise exceptional patient care and safety initiatives and encourage the spread of innovation to support a more sustainable NHS.

Philip Schwab, UK Government Affairs Director, AbbVie commented: “We are committed to looking beyond the medicine for solutions that help improve health outcomes for people living with disease. These awards recognise true examples of grass roots innovation, that support the NHS by freeing up valuable resources that can be used in other areas.”

Winners received their awards at the Big Idea for Better Health Awards ceremony at the House of Commons in London, which connected winners and finalists with their local MPs with the goal of spreading healthcare innovation and best practice across constituencies.

As winners of these awards, each team will receive a bursary of up to £3,000 to spend on research to grow their own experiences and share best practice that will benefit patients and/or the NHS.

Award winners:

The Movement Disorder Team at South Tees NHS Foundation Trust, Teeside in the ‘Driving Prevention and Early Intervention’ category – for establishing the Parkinson’s Advanced Symptoms Unit to prevent emergency hospital and care admissions, and allow for rapid response to potential problems faced by people living with Parkinson’s disease. The project has seen a 7% reduction in emergency admissions, 50% reduction in hip fractures, 50% reduction in nursing home savings, £40,000 of medication savings and almost £1,000,000 of potential savings to the Trusts, CCGs and local authorities over the past 2 years.

Arthur’s Place CIC in the ‘Delivering Care Closer to Home’ category – for developing the ‘Arthur’s Place’ website and peer-to-peer support network for young people (18-30) living with arthritis. The project provides vulnerable young adults with the age-appropriate information and support around topics that they care about with the goal of meeting the unmet needs identified by the young adults themselves. According to the services 3-month snapshot, over 44,000 young people have viewed the content pages of Arthursplace.co.uk over 175,000 times, and it supports on average 1367 young adults every month via a series of materials including articles written by healthcare professionals specifically for the platform and personal experiences written by the young adults themselves.

Lymphoma Action in the ‘Supporting Self-Management and Self-Care’ category for their ‘Live your Life’ programme. The programme aims to further improve quality of life and support self-management of the long-term healthcare needs of people living with lymphoma post-treatment via events that provide lymphoma specific information and support. Since 2017 the project has seen over 1,300 people attend the events with 97% of people saying that they now know which signs and symptoms to report to their healthcare professional, 96% saying that they feel confident that they can now tell their healthcare provider concerns even when he or she does not ask, and 89% saying that they feel better able to cope with fatigue and/or pain and therefore more able to undertake ‘normal’ daily activities.

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Notes to editors

About the awards

The independent panel of judges was looking for outstanding examples of improvement and innovation that demonstrates clear benefits to the lives of patients to make our health service more sustainable. There are three award categories which are listed below:

Supporting Self-Management and Self-Care - this award focuses on initiatives that can enable people to take a new approach to their care and wellbeing by really taking control

Delivering Care Closer to Home - this category recognises and celebrates the very best example of projects that free up NHS resources by allowing for care to be delivered outside of the traditional healthcare setting.

Driving Prevention and Early Intervention - this is awarded to the best example of system improvement that reduces strain on the NHS and wider healthcare system.

The awards are designed for people who are responsible for developing and running initiatives relevant to one of the categories. Healthcare professionals, healthcare organisations and patient groups were invited to enter.

To ensure rigour and balance an independent multi-disciplinary judging panel was assembled to judge the categories.