Community Care initiative of the year

Community
Community Care initiative of the year
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Patient safety is the cornerstone of community care, ensuring individuals receive the highest standard of care closer to home while reducing risks and improving outcomes. This award celebrates initiatives that have significantly enhanced safety standards through innovative approaches, addressing challenges such as delayed discharges, fragmented care pathways, and inconsistent service quality. By embedding patient safety into every aspect of care delivery, these projects demonstrate how community care can achieve exceptional outcomes.

These initiatives emphasise measurable improvements in patient safety, leveraging tools like virtual wards, digital health solutions, and streamlined discharge processes to reduce risks and enhance care continuity. They highlight how proactive, patient-centred approaches can not only improve safety but also create scalable models for wider implementation. This award honours the teams driving these initiatives, showcasing their commitment to safeguarding patients while transforming community healthcare for the better.

Eligibility

This award is open to all NHS community care teams who can demonstrate improved patient safety and outcomes.

Ambition

  • Provide a clear rationale for the work, and provide context as to why the initiative or improvements were required.
  • What was the ambition for the project, and how did this draw on, or differ from, existing best practice?
  • Outline the targets set for patient safety and quality improvement, and what measures were put in place to achieve them.

Outcome

  • Clearly demonstrate the benefits of the initiative on quality of care, using quantitative evidence to show tangible positive impacts on the safety of patients within a community care setting.
  • Discuss any other positive outcomes that were a result of the initiative, which could include improved patient experience, waiting time reduction, capacity increase or optimised treatment pathways.
  • Include patient and/or staff testimonials supporting the efficacy of the initiative.

Spread

  • Show how these improvements in provision of safe, high-quality community care are replicable and scalable.
  • Outline the efforts made to share best practice, or examples of where this project has embedded and spread to other departments, settings or organisations.

Value

  • Clearly evidence how the initiative has improved value for patients and staff, in terms of patient experience, staff satisfaction and quality of care.
  • If possible, provide evidence of value creation in other areas, in terms of increased capacity, reduced costs, reduced variation and/or improved efficiencies.

Involvement

  • Show how patients were involved in decisions around their care, and their views were embedded in the design of the initiative
  • Provide clear evidence of a multidisciplinary approach, with all relevant parties fully engaging in the work, including managers, medics and nurses as well as patients and families, and how this has led to improved safety

To find out more

Partnership opportunities:  Sponsorship Sales Team
Awards entry enquiries: Delegate Sales Team
Judging and event management: Awards Support