Heartbeat: welearn – innovation, evidence and actions lead poster competition
March 24, 2021
Our annual poster competition culminated in a socially distanced online ceremony earlier this year when the contestants came together to showcase their hard work with a hope to be the lucky winner of a £5,000 grand prize.
From just shy of 100 posters submitted, 11 shortlisted finalists had the opportunity to present their poster to an audience of their peers and judges, highlighting how their work shows good practice, provides quality improvements, supports innovation, research or partnership working, and most importantly how it has resulted in improvements for patients, relatives and colleagues.
Announcing the results of the staff voted for ‘People’s Choice Award’ fell to Chief Finance Officer, Dinah McLannahan who awarded it to Louise Tromans for her poster entitled ‘A well timed innovation in imageguided pre-operative breast localisation’. Presenting the award, Dinah highlighted how the innovative work deploying the use of RFID tags had made a significant impact to breast cancer patients, improving their surgical outcomes and allowing procedure to continue even throughout the disruption brought on by COVID-19.
Announcing the first of the highly commended runners up fell to Non-Executive Director, Professor Kate Thomas who awarded Jason Yap and the Gynaeoncology team for their poster titled, ‘An innovative surgery which offers women with cervical cancer the opportunity to preserve fertility’. Awarding the team, Kate said: “This poster tells a very clear story through illustrations, graphs and text, it’s a fantastic story of how gynaecologists in this Trust have implemented a fantastic surgery that allows women with cervical cancer a chance to preserve their fertility. The poster shows how the proportion of women undergoing the surgery and going on to have at least one live baby is greater than that of published literature.”
The last highly commended award was presented by Head of Improvement, Melanie Griffith to Diya Baker from the Department of Ophthalmology for their poster ‘Assessing patient perspective of pre-printed forms in vitreo-retinal surgery’. Announcing her awards, Melanie said: “This poster is one that was very data driven, involved patients, took the time to gather data and took the time to design the test and from improvement terms did a fantastic job. Patients are really benefiting from this improvement with this work”.
The winner of the £5,000 grand prize was announced by Acting Chief Executive and Medical Director, Dr David Carruthers and went to Kathryn Dunn from the Department of Speech and Language Therapy for her poster entitled ‘Service Improvement – Speech and Language Therapy Services to mainstream schools’. Commending the poster, David said: “This poster showed evidence based change in practice, with engagement with service users, collaboration across systems and efforts targeted where the need was greatest.”
If you haven’t yet seen the posters, they will remain on display in the Education Centre at Sandwell. If you have the opportunity to do so, you can find out about the great quality improvement initiatives taking place across the Trust.