The Dave Richley Award for Outstanding Education
This award is given to a staff member, colleague who has proactively pushed education forward in their trust or the wider network. Raising standards and the profile of the cardiac workforce on the whole.
Winner: Sadie Bennett
Cardiac Clinical Scientist
University Hospitals of North Midlands
Sadie demonstrates enormous dedication to education, supporting colleagues to achieve PTP, STP & ETP qualifications & achieve BSE accreditation. As an Education Facilitator for PTP at Manchester Metropolitan University (2014-2016) she designed an online learning module that was highly praised by students & lecturers. She mentors colleagues to become work-based assessors improving training capacity within her department, delivers talks at a local heart support group, promoting cardiac science, explaining diagnostic procedures, etc. well-received by patients. Active within BSE, an assessor since 2015, and Accreditation Chair since 2020, she developed & implemented the assessor workshop to improve consistency in assessing standards, providing feedback & dealing with difficult conversations, resulting in increased positive feedback & reduced complaints/appeals. She develops online educational content for the BSE prep course, has co-authored educational guidelines, incl. triage, pregnancy & diastolic function, & regularly presents at local, national & international events. Received BSE Fellowship – recognition for voluntary work in accreditation/education. Nominated for BJCA’s Trainer of the Year for supporting Cardiology SpRs in echo.
Innovation Award for Transformation
This award is given to a staff member or colleague who has proactively created transformational change in a service or department. This change has led to either financial savings, time savings or resulted in a better diagnostic provision allowing better patient flow
Winner: Helen Kavanagh
Clinical Scientist – Lead for Pacing
Somerset NHS Foundation Trust
Helen has worked tirelessly over the past few years as a strong advocate for equality of care for our CRM patients across Somerset. Alongside advocating for the best care for all our patients cohorts, she constantly strives to ensure she is up to date with her CPD and has been awarded her Certificate of STP equivalence. Back in 2013 an audit demonstrated minimum changes were made to PPMs at review appointments due to the forever improving technology within the systems. With this knowledge and a limited budget, she set up a home monitoring service which proved essential in COVID. She has designed a service whereby only home monitoring conditional devices are implanted, therefore future-proofing the service. In particular, a vendor whose monitoring suited the patient population, frequency of transmissions, and specific information required by the service were selected. This service was particularly beneficial for patients during COVID, when restrictions were in place. With the knowledge of which patients are suited to this service and which are not, she is a strong advocate for alert-based only home monitoring. She now has over 5000 patients enrolled with HM. All of this work is tied tightly with SOPs inline with BHRS guidelines, furthermore, she is constantly amending the documents to ensure they reflect national guidance. Our patients now receive the benefits of reduced in-person checks which is incredibly beneficial to our elderly, rural population. Additionally, early detection of lead issues, early detection of device malfunctions, and additional benefits to our MRI and radiotherapy populations. She continues to advocate for equality of care for all our CRM patients and is appealing for additional admin support to support the service and ensure it is working optimally, with as few disconnects as possible. Furthermore, alongside the echo team, Helen has set up a box-change/LV function clinic to ensure all patients who have a device coming to ERI have a device check and focused echo scan at the same time to ensure the right device is implanted when they reach ERI. This prevents patients returning for two appointments. In summary, Helen deserves the Innovator Prize for Transformation for her work transforming the CRM service to ensure inclusive and equal care for all pacemaker patients across Somerset, where rural locations, lack of public transport, and the stoic farming community create a unique patient cohort.
Patient Care Award of Excellence
This is awarded to a staff member or colleague who proactively offers exceptional patient care on a daily basis. Going above and beyond in a pursuit that offers excellent patient care.
Winner: Helen Hodgson
Cardiac Physiologist
Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Foundation Trust
The RUH team has had the pleasure of working with Helen for over twenty years now. What stands out for them with Helen, (apart from her skills with the ukulele and songwriting ability) is her passion for supporting her patients and her drive to make things better. Helen goes out of her way to facilitate, educate and support patients from a number of different backgrounds simply because she recognises that support is needed. Helen set up and ran for many years, a cardiac rehabilitation group for people in the Frome area where she is from. Her infectious personality always helped those patients who, after suffering a recent myocardial infarction, found returning to exercise a very worrisome and difficult thing to do. Helen also started a community Atrial Fibrillation (AF) support group for patients in and around her local area, recognising that patients with this very common condition required more support, education and a forum in which they could ask questions and learn from the experiences of others. She started this with no funding, no location, and simply a desire to support patients with this condition.
Rising Star Award
The Rising Star Award is given to a staff member or colleague who has recently qualified or is undertaking an Apprenticeship, ETP, PTP or STP qualification and shows great insight and innovation in the role. The actions of this colleague will likely offer better diagnostic service within the workforce and/or their approach to their job will allow for better patient care.
Winner: Jacques Robertson
Trainee Clinical Scientist
Somerset NHS Foundation Trust
Jacques is a highly dedicated and outstanding trainee clinical scientist who has excelled in his learning over the past three years. He leads utilising a quiet and methodical approach and by consistently displaying behaviours that one admires in a strong leader. Consequently, more junior staff are drawn to him for educational and mentorship support. Now at the end of his STP training programme, he is already mentoring a second-year STP student and providing educational and training opportunities. He spent his own time creating and executing an ECG interpretation teaching series for our cardiographer team to support them in taking the SCST certificate in ECG. With this, he has brought along a 2nd year STP to help teach his curriculum and they are about to embark on running the series again this year, with the addition of providing hybrid Teams teaching sessions for students on the ETP with no prior ECG knowledge. Where he sees a gap in the current training and education, he is quick to facilitate changes. Jacques always treats patients with utmost professionalism with a human touch and numerous positive feedback has been received from patients about how he is going to be a fabulous clinical scientist. He quietly completes tasks without a fuss, and will attempt to solve problems himself before coming to senior staff to ask for help, that said, he is very aware of his limitations and acknowledges when he needs support from his supervisors in the clinical environment. He appreciates the value of teamwork, gets on with all types of personalities, and will always make the best of any situation to pull learning from all experiences, he instills confidence in the team and is truly patient-centred. Jacques has completed his MSc dissertation recently and his nominators believe the quality and content of his work is publishable, and has shown some interesting findings when evaluating the utility of left atrial strain as a sub-clinical marker of diastolic dysfunction in breast care patients at risk of cardiotoxicity during chemotherapy with Herceptin.
Cardiac Scientist of the Year 2024
This award recognises a cardiac scientist / cardiac physiologist who has demonstrated outstanding commitment to the profession and inspired others in the field by raising the profile of cardiac science and improve patient care through innovative practices.
Winner: Emily King
Cardiac Clinical Scientist
Somerset Foundation Trust
Emily is recognised for her outstanding contributions as regional practice educator for the Cardiac Scientist Training Programme (STP) students in the Southwest region. Her commitment and innovative approach to enhancing the educational experiences of these students have distinguished them as leaders in the field. Her impact on the education of Cardiac STP students has been remarkable. One of her key achievements is the establishment of regular teaching sessions, which have been vital in fostering a collaborative learning environment. These sessions provide a platform for exchanging ideas, discussing best practices, and addressing challenges faced by students in their training. Emily’s leadership in organising and facilitating these meetings has been crucial in promoting a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Emily recognises the importance of practical experiences that simulate real-world scenarios. She spearheaded the creation of an NHS Futures workspace tailored specifically for Cardiac STP students. This virtual platform allows students to access resources, participate in case studies, and engage in interactive learning activities. Her foresight in utilizing technology to enhance educational opportunities demonstrates their innovative spirit and dedication to advancing the field. Her leadership extends beyond the classroom. She actively collaborates with stakeholders across healthcare settings to ensure that all receive comprehensive and diverse training experiences. Her ability to work effectively with clinical teams, educators, and administrators highlights her role as a bridge-builder within the HCS community.
Cardiographer of the Year 2024
This award recognises a cardiographer / associate practitioner/support worker who has demonstrated outstanding commitment to patient care, supporting colleagues and inspiring others.
Winner: Susan Davison
Cardiographer
Somerset NHS Foundation Trust
Sue has worked at Musgrove Park Hospital for many years. She is a diligent, caring, and fun member of the cardiac physiology team. Unlike many cardiographers, Sue has a plethora of hats. She works entirely in a patient-focused capacity to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and access of services to our patient cohort. Her care and kind heart is far-reaching. When she is not fitting Holter monitors and performing ECGs, she can be found running the echo inpatient service. Sue provides us with a steady stream of patients, who she has often collected herself, acquired their height and weight and attached them to the echo ECG. They are already on their left hand side when we appear to scan them, ensuring as many patients as possible can have their IP echo, to help guide management, treatment, and often discharge. She collates our list of inpatient transthoracic echo waiting list, sorts all the requests into the correct time and room for the day (yes we are still not paperless) for the two CDC echo rooms and the four echo rooms at MPH. She then distributes the authorised reports. Additionally, Sue looks after the inpatient transoesophageal echo waiting list. Single-handedly, she finds slots on the system, completes the safety paperwork for the ward staff, and physically takes the details to the ward team to ensure our TOE slots are not wasted due to communication errors. Furthermore, she books porters for the TOE jobs indicating the patient needs to come on their bed. If they dare arrive in a chair, she promptly sends them back to do the job properly. In addition to these fabulous roles, she works with our cardiac rhythm management team where she identifies any patient disconnections from one of our major home monitoring sites and works on establishing these connections, whether that be by writing to them or over telephone calls. Sue is one in a million and in recent weeks has turned up to push patients upwards of 100kg with a broken thumb and no complaints, she ensures the team are plied with caffeine and works above and beyond for many of our patient cohorts within Cardiology, she is a cardiographer, admin extraordinaire that keeps the service running faultlessly. In summary, Sue, ensures parity of care for all patients within Somerset. She has many roles, putting her all into each and everyone, dedicating many years to the Cardiology team at Somerset Foundation Trust.
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