Three UHDB teams shortlisted for the 2025 HSJ Patient Safety Awards
Congratulations to the three teams across University Hospitals of Derby and Burton (UHDB) who have been shortlisted for the HSJ Patient Safety Awards 2025, recognising the impact of their exceptional work and commitment to our patients and communities.
The nominated teams have made a positive difference to our patients accessing Parkinson's and Dermatology services, as well as improving safety and quality through our digital transformation journey, supporting maternity and neonatal care.
The HSJ Patient Safety Awards recognises best practice in the NHS and celebrates outstanding examples of where public sector and healthcare organisations have made a positive and lasting impact to patient care, safety and service quality.
Gis Robinson, Chief Medical Officer at UHDB, said: "Our patients rightly expect and deserve high-quality and safe care, underpinned with good experiences when they are in our care. At UHDB we strive to embed a patient safety culture where colleagues and teams can take ownership of driving good patient safety practice, quality improvement work and embedding a learning ethos, where we are empowered to make things better for those we care for.
"Many of us who work in the NHS do what we do for our patients who are at the heart of our service, and often do it without praise - but it is so important that we recognise these shining examples of exceptional patient safety in practice. It is a proud moment for me to see some of the excellent work our people do be recognised nationally - a lot of effort, time and work has gone into bringing these services and improvements to life, and I want to congratulate everyone who has been nominated for their hard work."
The award ceremony is on 15 September 2025, where winners will be announced - good luck to all our shortlisted teams. View all the shortlists for this year's HSJ Patient Safety Awards here >.
Our shortlisted teams
The Parkinson's Rapid Advisory and Intervention Therapy Service, who are shortlisted for the Deteriorating Patients and Rapid Response Initiative of the Year category.
The service was launched early last year and is based between the community, the Royal Derby Hospital and Florence Nightingale Community Hospital, which is considered a Parkinson's Foundation Centre of Excellence. The rapid response therapy service aims to improve patient experience for people living with Parkinson's disease. The service, led by Occupational Therapist Sophie Voyce and Physiotherapist Beth Denney, prioritises patients who are at risk of long length of stays, readmission within three months and those who require urgent crisis support to prevent an admission. The service aims to address referrals within 72 hours.
Early data could suggest that this approach has contributed to a reduction in readmissions, admissions due to falls and bed days for people with Parkinson's. The service has received positive feedback from colleagues, patients and their families.
Our Dermatology department , who are shortlisted for the Harnessing a Human Factors Approach to Improve Patient Safety Award.
Learning from mistakes and when things don't go right in healthcare is an important part of continuous quality improvement and making our services safer for patients. So, when errors happened involving two skin biopsies, our Dermatology department had a proactive approach to investigate what happened, why and what would help to prevent this from occurring again. They reviewed patient factors, staffing, communication, staff training and education, differences in surgical practices across the Trust and other human factors that could have contributed to the incidents.
As a result, the team changed and standardised the practice across the department at all Trust sites, ensuring local procedural, policy and safety standards were updated to reflect the improvements. This collaborative learning-focussed approach to tackling preventable errors was led by Consultant Dermatologist Dr Maulina Sharma, and has improved the quality of the Trust dermatology service, and safety for our patients.
Our Maternity EPR team , who are shortlisted for the Developing a Positive Safety Culture Award.
At a time where maternity colleagues were already making significant changes through our Maternity and Neonatal Improvement programme, to improve quality and safety of maternity care, they also successfully launched a brand new electronic patient record system (EPR) system to transform how colleagues document information for women, birthing people and babies.
In June 2024, we launched BadgerNet, our EPR in maternity services, which was extended to neonatal services in January 2025. The system provides access to patient records in a single place for all UHDB sites and community teams, in real-time, which can also be accessed by neighbouring trusts who use the same system. It also has a patient facing app called BadgerNotes which supports better information sharing during pregnancy and provides women with instant access to their maternity notes.
The maternity EPR project team, a collaboration between digital colleagues and clinical teams, have been shortlisted for their determination and focus to embed the new digital system which, one year on, is already benefitting our patients and colleagues. Digitalising processes has reduced the time clinicians spend on admin work, giving frontline teams more time to deliver care to patients.