S Ar AW RDS

Over the next several months, we will celebrate winners of the 2022 Star Awards, recognising them for their hard work and the positive impact this has had on our people, patients and population.

We’ll be speaking directly with the winners to get their views and hear what winning meant to them. For this month’s Our Winners, we spoke with the winners of the Patient Safety Award and the Prize for Research and Transformation.

Patient Safety Award

Justine Irish was the winner of this year’s Patient Safety Award. Justine works as a matron on the community wards within PCCT. She works with a large multi-disciplinary team, including therapists, GPs, advanced clinical practitioners, social workers and many more who are all committed to providing the very best care to our service users.

Justine is dedicated to providing excellent care to all her patients, and prioritises safety within the environment. She thinks this attitude lead to her win: “I think it was a mixture of leading the teams on our safety journey, really majoring on our safety culture and what it means to us and our people, that won me the award.”

Justine has introduced a number of measures, such as “Implementation of our safety huddles, nutrition and hydration quality improvement work (traffic light jug lids, ‘But first a drink’, urinary tract infection/catheter reductions), sepsis introduction of a PGD alongside recognition and treatment in a community setting, falls reduction, nurse led care rounding and many more quality and safety initiatives.”

This work has enabled Justine to improve patient outcomes in the community wards, and her dedication being recognised has meant that a huge amount to her in her role. Justine stated, “The win means so much, not just for me but for the people I work with who engage daily, provide support and are committed to the safety agenda and keeping people as safe as possible.”

Justine Irish, Matron

Justine attended the awards ceremony on the 6 October 2022 and had a great time, noting “It was lovely to see so many colleagues enjoying time outside of the workplace.”

In the longer term, Justine states the win has improved her confidence in what she does day-to-day. “It is my passion to do what I do around quality and safety. In the future, my ambition is to do this on a bigger scale: the win has given me the confidence to continually do that and to bring more