The hard work of our teams to recover our services from the pandemic and reduce our waiting lists has been shortlisted in the annual HSJ awards’ Performance Recovery category, while our Divisional Director of Surgery, Thangadorai Amalesh, is up for Clinical Leader of the year.

Thangadorai Amalesh is pictured above (left) during a visit to our surgical hub with David Sloman, Chief Operating Officer of NHSE (right), and Krishna Vemulapalli, Orthopaedics Clinical Lead (centre).

We've also been shortlisted for the Using Data to Connect Services award, in recognition of the introduction of a digital referral for patients with musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions.

Following the first wave of Covid-19 our teams have been finding new and innovative ways to get our patients the care they need. This has included our ‘Bones’ weeks, focusing all our resources on carrying out a large number of operations, the first of which saw 250 procedures carried out.

We’ve run prEYEority weeks to reduce our Ophthalmology waiting list, with 980 patients seen over just five days and the waiting time for surgery reduced, and our Gastronaught project saw clinical and admin colleagues working together to review patients.

We’ve also held ENT Kidz, a series of weekend ear, nose and throat super clinics for our young patients.

Each initiative has helped us to learn and improve upon the next and in some cases led to permanent changes, such as all referrals being triaged by our gastroenterology consultants before being offered an appointment, in case they actually need to be seen by another department, reducing wasted appointments.

Thangadorai Amalesh said: “I am proud and humbled for myself and our work to be shortlisted in these categories. It’s a huge boost for the team who have all contributed to this. It’s never down to one person’s effort.

“This shows the resilience of our teams, as well as their ambition and vision to improve care for our patients. They have shown incredible innovation in helping us to reduce our waiting lists and get patients the care they need, doing things which had never been done before.”

For Marie Loizides, Associate Director of Performance Analytics and a physiotherapist by background (above), the shortlisting of our digital referral, Rego, is the culmination of two years of hard work, which included working across our primary care partners to create the North East London MSK Alliance.

She said: “It auto-triages patients at the point of referral, which ensures they are streamed to the right place first time, positively impacting 50,000 patients each year. It also benefits our GPs, saving 3,000 hours a year in writing referrals, the equivalent of adding a GP (and a bit more) back into the system, seeing patients.”

Our Therapy Manager, Rebecca Coughlan, played a huge role in leading the clinical side of the project, working with GPs, physiotherapy services, consultants, and NEC, which provided the software, to give the best possible care for patients, ensuring they’re seen in the right place, first time.

Winners will be announced at a ceremony in London this November.