December 2011
Children suffering from bedwetting (enuresis) and their families are now receiving an award winning service – thanks to the initiative and drive of school nurse Felicity Hill and Central Surrey Health’s enuresis team.
Central Surrey Health’s 0-19 team beat off stiff competition to win the ‘Employee Innovation’ category in the 2011 Phillip Baxendale Awards. The award was accepted by managing director, Jo Pritchard – herself a nurse and health visitor, at the Employee Ownership Association annual conference on 9th November.
In the summer of 2011, seeing real scope to improve their service, Felicity Hill and her colleagues were given the freedom to lead a re-design of their service. The result is a quicker, higher quality and more consistent service:
- The team now has an additional 1 hour 45 minutes a week as a result of streamlining and reducing administration – enabling them to provide a service to more children and their families during the year
- Parents are feeling more involved earlier in the assessment process
- By gathering more information from parents and what they’d like, the team have increased the time children and their families have in clinic, which reduces the number of times they have to attend. The team have also increased the ways in which they support and provide advice to families, including face to face time in clinics, phone and email.
In the words of a child who’s benefited from the service: “Thank you for your help and advice. I am drinking lots and I’m now dry at night. A big thank you.”
The work initiated by Felicity has now been adopted across the entire enuresis team, and ranged from re-writing policies and introducing more useful assessments to
centralising admin and putting forms online.
Campbell McDonald, director at the Baxi Partnership says: “Felicity and the enuresis team are a shining example of how co-owned organisations such as Central Surrey
Health can harness innovation to bring about changes to services that really do benefit patients and their families.”
Central Surrey Health was also shortlisted for two other categories in the 2011 Phillip Baxendale Awards: Outstanding Leadership, and People and Culture. In 2010 Central Surrey Health was declared the ‘runaway winner’ in the Employee Ownership Initiative category. Central Surrey Health managing director, Jo Pritchard, concludes: “Through having the freedom to innovate and do things differently, we’re proving that co-ownership has the power to transform community healthcare services for the better.”