The Healthcare ICT Champion of the Year: and other winners in the BT e-Health Insider Awards

Almost 400 guests turned out for this year’s BT e-Health Insider Awards in London, where the Healthcare ICT Champion of the Year was announced. Lyn Whitfield was among them.

Read the newspapers, and you’d believe that nothing ever goes right with NHS IT. One day the news is that the NHS is failing to adopt new technology to help patients. The next day the headlines are all about the latest “failed” implementation of a computer system.

The BT e-Health Insider Awards, held this year at the Millennium Mayfair Hotel in London, showed that things are not so bad. On the contrary, they showed that across the country, NHS organisations are making use of technology to reach out to the patients and public and deliver higher quality, safer care.

The winning projects included a web-based system to help clinicians communicate with profoundly deaf and foreign language patients and a public health campaign built around web, text and blue-tooth messaging.

They also included a Scottish electronic records project that is giving out-of-hours staff important information about their patients, an English software package that helps direct people to the right out-of-hours service in the first place, and an innovative wireless network that is supporting care at a hospital in Wales.

And the champion is...

Microsoft sponsored the Healthcare ICT Champion of the Year Award, a special category decided not by the judging panel, but by the members of the Microsoft NHS Resource Centre community and readers of the E-Health Insider website.

As the 400 guests started to arrive at the back-tie event on the evening of 17 November, last year’s champion, Mike Bainbridge, explained what it had meant to him. “I was really delighted to win the award,” said NHS Connecting for Health’s clinical architect, “and it really helped to put the work that is going on in England centre stage.

“Since the award, I have been taken much more seriously. I have been given invitations to speak all over the world. And the message is we all have the same problems and we can solve them together.”

This year, seven people allowed their names to go forward for the champion award, and 1,151 votes were cast. The winner was Sue Rushbrook, head of systems and network services at York Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

 Her nominee said she should win for creating: “a leading edge, patient-centred clinical application and community network across primary and secondary care” and for “selflessly pushing back the boundaries and resistance to change that such innovation often generates.” Ms Rushbrook also leads a team of more than 50 staff – three of who went up to collect her award, since she was away in Australia.

IT matters, but people matter more

After the message about the importance of IT to healthcare, persistence and teamwork were the themes of the evening. As coffee was served and the winners’ announcements began, Sir Jonathan Michael, chief executive of the LSP programme at BT Health reflected that a lot had happened since last year’s awards.

“It has been a big year for the NHS, with the Next Stage Review by Lord Darzi and the subsequent Health Informatics Review,” he said. “Both of those reports emphasised the importance of e-health, and that without it we will not be able to deliver high quality healthcare that is also safer and better value for money.”

However, he stressed that IT was only an “enabler” and that “when a hospital, or any other organisation, commits to putting in IT systems, it commits to changing its business and ways of working.”

The event’s master of ceremonies, GP and comic Dr Phil Hammond also noted that however many IT systems were in place, they could only be as good as the people who used them. “People matter,” he said. “These awards show that people matter. IT is an enabler. You have to unite staff around it.”

The theme was picked up by the winners. A new, overall winner award went to University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, for the work done by its Quality and Outcomes Research Unit in co-ordinating and analysing patient information.

Daniel Ray, who collected the award, said the key to the project had been management support and close working between the IT team and clinicians. “We have linked ten systems in our trust to get information out of them for research and to improve patient care,” he said. “This was a great team effort and it is great to get recognition for all the work that has been done.”

His colleague, cardiothoracic surgeon Domenico Pagano, was both more and less serious. He joked that the awards had been the best night “since the night in 2006 when Italy won the world cup.”

As the dinner ended and the serious celebrations got underway, Mark Treleaven, Microsoft UK’s healthcare strategic marketing manager, said: “This is a great opportunity to help people really understand the value of information and communication technology in healthcare.

“We all know there is no way we can deliver improved healthcare without enhancing ICT, and it is great to have the chance to celebrate some of the work that is actually going on.”