North east London wins at the HSJ Awards

wo north east London projects won awards at last week’s (16 November) prestigious HSJ Awards, with a further two projects being highly commended. Congratulations to everyone involved in these innovative projects!

Tree Of Life In Schools project for African and Caribbean heritage young people project

This City and Hackney-specific project, which was a joint partnership between East London NHS Foundation Trust, NHS North East London, Hackney CVS, Hackney Council and the City of London Corporation, won the Innovation and Improvement in Reducing Healthcare Inequalities Award.

Tree of Life is a strength-based, culturally attuned therapeutic approach, created by Zimbabwean psychologist Ncazelo Ncube. With the support of Ncazelo, the partnership developed the use of the model in an innovative way for Hackney secondary schools as part of the Mental Health Support Teams (MHST) in schools programme. The project was delivered by trained Peer Leaders from African, Caribbean and dual heritage backgrounds to groups of students from the same background. Find out more on ELFT’s website.

Specialist pharmacy-led cardiovascular risk factor management in primary care campaign

A campaign to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke among men and women in north east London was named the Medicines, Pharmacy and Prescribing Initiative of the Year. The collaboration of GPs, pharmacists and hospital doctors from Barts Health and NHS North East London worked alongside Queen Mary University of London’s Clinical Effectiveness Group and UCLPartners on an educational programme to raise awareness of anticoagulants and statins amongst primary care clinicians. An advice service was also set up by specialist cardiac pharmacists from St Bartholomew’s Hospital to discuss the suitability of the medication in the most complex cases.

Prescription rates for anticoagulants increased from 88% to 94% – well above the national target of 90% – and over 3,000 people were offered statins. The team believe the approach has prevented at least 34 strokes and 41 heart attacks. Read more on Barts Health’s website.

Highly commended

• Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust was recognised for its elective surgical hub in the Acute Sector Innovation of the Year category.
• Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust was commended for its online speech and language therapy toolkit – Verbo – for children and young people in the Driving Efficiency Through Technology category.

You can find a full list of winners on the HSJ Awards website.