NGH nurse wins a national award for the way she has worked with patients, carers, and hospital teams to improve dementia care

Dementia Liaison Nurse Rebecca Goadsby, PPI Award winner

The way an NGH nurse has worked alongside hospital staff to improve dementia care by listening to patients and carers has won a national award.

Lead Dementia Liaison Nurse Rebecca Goadsby – who worked with colleagues from across the hospital - has won a HQIP Clinical Audit Heroes Award in the Patient & Public Involvement category.

The Awards are hosted by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) (see editor’s notes) and form part of national Clinical Audit Week (June 24-28, 2024) - which aims to raise of the profile of the importance of audits to test and check on whether things are working well in healthcare.

Rebecca was nominated for the award by the Royal College of Physicians after she gave a presentation there on the project she led in January 2024.

She said: “It was a surprise to be nominated and I am thrilled that the work I – and many other of our hospital teams – did to improve dementia care has been recognised at a national level.

“We won the award for the way we used audits to give us the insights into what we needed to do to improve care for dementia patients and how better to support their families.

“We started by gathering as much information as possible on the dementia care experience at NGH with the support of the Patient Experience Team, Volunteer Services, the Clinical Audit Team, Northants Carers, our own ward staff, consultants and safeguarding team.

“We looked at complaints, questionnaires, and feedback from the wards and also held three listening events for patients and carers in 2023.

“This enabled us to form a Dementia Focus Group made up of people living with dementia and carers who help us to decide on how best to improve services.

“Our work found that we needed to do much more to listen to people living with dementia and their carers, to keep people informed about care decisions, to better support patients at mealtimes, to avoid unnecessary ward moves, and to fully involve families in hospital care.

“I would like to thank the members of our Dementia Focus Group for their continued support.”

As a result of the work changes are being made to look at how teams can improve the way they ‘handover’ patients to the next team on shifts to maintain continuity of care, a review of the dementia patient pathway and a strong push on dementia education to staff using video clips.

The award organisers say that Rebecca’s project was recognised for its patient engagement activities which the judges said had genuine impact, with carers involved continuously, including providing input into reports, focus groups and webinars.

Chris Gush, CEO of HQIP, explains: “Without clinical audit, we would lack the necessary insights to understand what is working well and, crucially, what is not. By measuring our healthcare services and tracking the differences that improvement activities make, clinical audits are directly contributing to saving and improving patients’ lives.”

If you are interested in joining NGH’s Dementia Focus Group please contact ngh-tr.dementiasupport@nhs.net