Home > News > NHS Heroes and staff awards

Published: 3 Aug 2012

Tweets from the top

NHS Heroes is a new national award scheme that recognises the efforts of staff whose expertise, passion for care, concern and everyday kindness touches the lives of patients and their families in hospital and community services. People whose day-to-day work has changed, enhanced or even saved a life dear to them.

There are a vast number of amazing people at St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who are doing great things every single day. These awards are a great opportunity to recognise those people.

The awards are open to all staff working in the NHS, whether they are clinical or not, and nominations can be submitted until mid-September on the NHS Heroes website www.nhsheroes.com

At St George’s we have a set of values that set out the standards of behaviour we expect from all our staff – excellent, kind, responsible, respectful.

Staff nominate their colleagues who they feel best embody these behaviours and deserve recognition for a Living Our Values Award, with a team and individual award for each value. Over the last year awards have been given to staff in a diverse range of services, including the sewing room, mortuary and central booking service.

These winners were amongst the lucky few who got a sneak preview of the Olympic games opening ceremony last Monday. Every NHS trust in London was given tickets for the dress rehearsal, and there were no more deserving recipients than our Living Our Values Award winners.

Last week Sue Lowndes, advanced nurse practitioner at St George’s, was voted ‘Breast Care Nurse of the Year 2011’ by patients and customers of a specialist women’s clothing company.

International Nurses’ Day was celebrated at St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust on Friday 11th May with the trust’s annual Nurse of the Year awards.

Awards presented include Nurse of the Year, Midwife of the Year, Healthcare Assistant of the Year and Mentor of the Year. All award nominations were put forward by trust colleagues for their outstanding contribution over the last year.

The ‘Auntie Lucy’ award, a nursing education award of up to £1,000 in memory of former St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust employee Lucy Kpobie, was also presented at this ceremony.

Let us know who your NHS Hero is…

Notes to editors

For more information, please contact the Communications Unit on 020 8725 5151 or email communications@stgeorges.nhs.uk. Outside working hours, please page us by calling 0844 822 2888, leaving a short message and contact details for pager SG548.

About St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust

  • St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the largest healthcare providers in southwest London. Its main site, St George’s Hospital in Tooting – one of the country’s principal teaching hospitals – is shared with St George’s, University of London, which trains medical students and carries out advanced medical research. As well as acute hospital services, the trust provides a wide variety of specialist and community hospital based care and a full range of community services to children, adults, older people and people with learning disabilities. These services are provided from Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton, 11 health centres and clinics, schools and nurseries, patients’ homes and Wandsworth Prison.
  • St George’s Hospital, Tooting, is one of London’s four major trauma centres. In 2011/12 the emergency department at St George’s Hospital treated an average 447 patients each day, with 95.06 per cent of patients being admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours.
  • St George’s Hospital is one of eight hyper acute stroke units in London. The trust’s stroke services were rated as the best in the country by the National Sentinel Audit 2010, and in the top four in 2011.
  • St George’s Hospital has one of the biggest and busiest of the eight heart attack centres in London. The heart attack centre at St George’s Hospital was rated as having the best response rate for treating heart attack patients in London in the 2012 Myocardial Ischaemia National Audit Project (MINAP).
  • The trust is an accredited centre of excellence for trauma, neurology, cardiology and cancer services, and the national centre for family HIV care and bone marrow transplantation for non-cancer diseases.
  • In 2011 the trust was named by the Dr Foster report for the Department of Health in the group of trusts with the lowest mortality rates in the country. The trust was one of only 14 in the country to have statistically significant lower than expected mortality rates.
  • The trust passed all national cancer treatment and diagnosis targets in 2011/12, improving the prospects for thousands of cancer patients.
  • In April 2012 the trust reported its lowest ever infection rates, with a 95 per cent reduction in MRSA over the last five years and only one MRSA bacteraemia (blood stream) infection in 2011/12.
  • The 2011 Care Quality Commission (CQC) national inpatient survey has confirmed that the trust is achieving results expected of a major healthcare provider, ranking ‘about the same’ as similar trusts in the country in all 77 survey questions.
  • The trust has returned a financial surplus for the last five years and has no historic debt. This has allowed the trust to invest in front line services and estate and facilities development, including the recent redevelopment of the A&E unit, the opening of a state-of-the-art regional breast cancer screening centre, and the development of a new pre-operative care centre. The trust is also developing state-of-the-art neurorehabilitation services at St George’s and Queen Mary’s Hospitals.