Thank You Event 2022: Team of the Year – Highly Commended
Every year we celebrate our amazing staff and their achievements at our pop-up Thank You ceremony. Board members will pop into video meetings to surprise colleagues and present them with a hamper for being shining examples of our magnificent staff behaviours.
The Cardiac Service are our highly commended Team of the Year.
Team of the Year – Highly Commended
The Cardiac Service have pulled together as a team to maintain an excellent service for their vulnerable patient group and looked after each other in the process. During the pandemic, the level of complexity they dealt with increased as patients with heart failure often wanted to avoid admission to hospital due to the high risk of catching Covid. This meant they were managing patients at home who ideally required acute care and were often in the palliative stages of their condition. The team have also worked tirelessly to get through a waiting list of patients following the reset of the service.
Caroline Stocks, Clinical Head of Service, and Sue Wilson, Interim Operational Head of Service, explained their reason for nominating the team was largely because of how they adapted the service to maintain provision for the most vulnerable groups over the last few unpredictable and challenging years. They achieved this by careful management of patients, their treatment and assessments, an increase in remote consultations, virtual clinics’ for cardiology support and embracing the use of the new RESPECT template with all patients discharged from hospital.
In addition, partnership working with the Virtual Frailty Ward, Cardiologists from Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Leeds City Council has been key to the services success. To overcome the closing of the Cardiac Activity Programme the service took a creative and innovative approach by designing a virtual programme with telephone support and the facilitated the use of the MyHeart app.
Caroline and Sue added, “All this high-quality work was done while staff were feeling isolated and supporting several new starters in the team. The Clinical and Operational Leads worked hard to ensure the team felt cared for and valued during this time and shared a real vision for how they were going to get through it all together.”
Brodie Clark CBE, Chair, and Dr Ruth Burnett, Executive Medical Director, surprised the team and praised their hard work. Brodie said, “From the Trust, thank you. Its brilliant and you should be very proud. You’ve demonstrated creativity, determination and resilience in making sure people are cared for and treated properly and effectively in this community. Huge congratulations.” Ruth finished by adding, “You are a really special team who has done some brilliant work. This is the kind of work, which for me is the future, I also recognise it's some of the hardest work we do. You work between all the boundaries, into primary and secondary care so have had to build brides into all directions. Huge thank you from me, it’s been brilliant to watch it grow and develop.”
Caroline Grice-Ellis, Cardiac Services Lead Nurse, said, “It’s fantastic, it’s so exciting. I really am fighting back my emotions. I just want to thank everybody for being so adaptable and flexible. What we’ve achieved and changed overnight has been fantastic, things we’ve been trying to chip away at for years. I could cry!”
