Health Foundation funded project wins prestigious Nursing Times award

The Nursing Times 2011 Award for best Cardiac Nursing has been won by a team at University Hospital North Staffordshire, funded through a Shine award.

The heart failure admission prevention project, involved the setting up of a heart failure day clinic to provide intravenous diuretics, specialist assessment, monitoring and intensive drug titration to affected patients.

The acute ambulatory heart failure unit also offers ongoing self management advice and psychological support for patients (and their carers) who are able to manage at home yet require specialist heart failure care. The clinic provides what is traditionally regarded as inpatient care, on an outpatient basis.

Providing this day clinic increases specialist involvement with heart failure patients, allows safer discharge from the emergency department, facilitates early discharge for patients to be at home whilst receiving intensive therapies, offers greater patient choice over treatment setting, and reduces the costs of care.

The award ceremony for the Nursing Times Awards 2011 was held on 2 November, at London’s Hilton hotel. This year saw the largest number of entries, up 70% from 2010 and over 800 nursing professionals were present at the ceremony to hear which new initiatives have inspired the nursing community throughout the past year.

Project lead James Rushton, Clinical nurse manager and Dr Satchi, University Hospital of North Staffordshire, said, ‘We, like many heart failure units are always striving to improve our standards of care for our patients. Despite a wealth of innovative ideas our aspirations have previously been constrained by finance and engagement within our health economy. Being awarded a Shine grant revitalised our entire team and added credence to our ideas.

‘The support of the Health Foundation has helped us focus our aims into achievable goals. We were privileged to have been shortlisted for the Nursing Times award for the best Cardiac Nursing Team, and elated at winning the award. The award and all of the hard work involved in achieving it has only been possible because of the Health Foundation and the SHINE grant.’

Helen Crisp, Assistant Director of Research and Development at the Health Foundation said, ‘The Health Foundation is extremely pleased and proud to hear that the Shine project team from University Hospital of North Staffordshire have won this prestigious award in recognition of their high standards of cardiac nursing care. We wish them continued success with this innovative project and look forward to working with them over the coming year so that we can share and spread the approach that they have developed.’

Our annual Shine programme aims to stimulate thinking, activity and the development of innovative approaches that will improve healthcare quality. It gives teams the space and encouragement to try out, develop and evaluate new ideas.