A paediatric community matron has been awarded “Nurse of the Year” at an awards ceremony in London.
Deborah Allcock won the award at the General Practice Awards – run by Nursing in Practice’s publishers, Cogora – for providing acute clinical services to children with respiratory difficulties in their community.
The paediatric community matron service has resulted in fewer emergency GP appointments and many patients have said with out the service they would have used OOH services, urgent care or A&E but not primary care.
She told Nursing in Practice: “I like to think I listen to what parents ask and that’s how I’ve set up the service, looking at what their needs were and what they wanted.”
Allcock added: “I think it’s good to be able to get that recognition out there so more practices can look at how we can set up teams like this and perhaps make the practice more feasible in other areas – so we show by our good practice how things can improve.”
Fens and Brecks Care Home Matron service also won last night, having been awarded “Nursing Team of the Year”.
The service, which was set up in June 2015 by eight local practices, looks after 14 Care Homes and 400 Care Home patients.
Four matrons, who are supported by Watlington Medical Centre administrators and two GPs, do all the acute visits and ward rounds in all the Care Home patients during the week.
The team won for enhancing the quality of care patients receive while at the same time reducing GP workload.
Team member Julie Long told Nursing in Practice: “We’re very unique and a lot of it is looking after patients who are quite neglected in the past with the care homes and we do take down the GP workload.”
She added that by winning the award she hopes similar services “can be rolled out across the whole country”.
Other winners include Dr Jonathan Grant Cope for GP of the year, Dr Ruth Heseltine for GP trainee of the year, Sandwell & West Birmingham CCG for general practice team of the year, Karin Bruce for Practice Manager of the year, Deborah Allcock for Nurse of the year and Fens and Brecks Care Home Matron Service for nursing team of the year.
