Read more about Liz's experience below:

I was awarded the British Empire Medal for two things, firstly the work I did as Staff Covid Swabbing Hub Lead with the Wolverhampton Quality Team, which is part of Black Country and West Birmingham CCG. This involved being day to day operational lead, and also taking a strategic lead on planning and the development of standard operating procedures and policies for staff swabbing. Secondly it was for leading on a Strategy and Retention Plan for General Practice Nursing across the CCG footprint, which was recognised by NHS England and Improvement.

Both of these projects were 100% team effort and couldn't have been achieved without the support of my clinical and non-clinical colleagues (from the CCG, general practice, acute trust and local authority) who worked on everything from policy development and co-design, to swabbing, security and marshaling, to booking patients in, chasing and recording results, to training, organising estate and the supply of equipment and PPE. I'm proud to share the award with them.

We unfortunately didn't win the HSJ Patient Safety Team of the year award but were shortlisted for the work we did around staff and care home swabbing, improving infection prevention procedures with the aim of reducing harm and safeguarding patients.

A new drug to lower cholesterol which was appraised by Warwick Evidence will be made available to hundreds of thousands of NHS patients.

Congratulations to Dr Lucy Hammond, who has recently achieved recognition as a Principal Fellow of Advance HE. Principal Fellowships are awarded to highly experienced and/or senior staff with wide-ranging academic or academic-related strategic leadership responsibilities in connection with key aspects of teaching and supporting learning.

Congratulations to Helen Nolan for her research publication in leading medical education journal Medical Education. Read it here: Medical Educators’ views and experiences of trigger warnings in teaching sensitive content

Manjula Patel has been awarded a PhD in Health and Social Studies for their PhD on ‘Compassionate Communities Approaches to End of Life Care as a Therapeutic Landscape’. Manjula was supervised by Anne-Marie Slowther and Gillian Hundt in the Division of Health Sciences.

Warwick Medical School authors, Dr Helen Atherton, Dr Jo Parsons and Dr Carol Bryce looked at the rate of missed GP appointments in the UK. Their findings are published in the BJGP and Jo Parsons is also interviewed in a podcast discussing some of the findings and implications of this work.

Missed general practice appointments have considerable time and cost implications for the NHS, and leaves patients with unmet health needs, and potentially delayed diagnoses or medical treatment. This systematic review, entitled ‘Which patients miss appointments with general practice and the reasons why’ updated work conducted in 2003, and aimed to examine the rate of missed booked appointments, which patients are more likely to miss appointments, and some reasons for this. Findings of this review has potential implications for practices in targeting interventions to patients that are at increased likelihood of missing appointments, and in attempting to overcome common reasons that appointments are missed.

More information can be found on the GP Online webpages here.

Professor Kate Seers has been conferred the honour of being admitted to the Freedom of The Barbers’ Company by Presentation, “in recognition of her immense contribution to the Company’s Clinical Nursing Scholarship Award programme” starting on 19th July 2021. This is a great honour and only 1% of Freemen join via Presentation (where the Court invites them to join the Company).

Hospice care across the West Midlands has received an exciting boost as WMS researchers have received a quarter of a million pound grant to establish better care for terminally ill patients.

Rachel Spencer (GP Academic Clinical Lecturer with UAPC) has been awarded a highly competitive NIHR Advanced Fellowship. This award is for £850,000 over four years and is the largest funding ever to be handled by Coventry and Rugby CCG.

We are pleased to share news that eight members of the WMS community have secured Fellowships with the University's Institute of Engagement.

BMJ Article

Congratulations to Professor Felicity Boardman who has been made a Foundation Fellow of the Warwick Institute of Engagement.

Congratulations to Professor Sophie Staniszewska who has been made a Foundation Fellow of the Warwick Institute of Engagement. Sophie says becoming a Foundation Fellow creates 'a great link for us and a chance to further embed involvement and engagement in our teaching and research'.

Compulsive exercise is an important symptom of the eating disorders. It affects up to 80% of patients and is associated with longer length of hospitalisation, poor recovery, increased physiological complications and relapse rates. Work conducted by Professor Caroline Meyer and her team has increased our understanding of the causes and maintenance factors associated with problematic exercise and has led to the development of screening and assessment tools. In addition, this work has resulted in the development of LEAP, which is a cognitive-behavioural based approach specifically aimed at reducing compulsive exercise cognitions and behaviours.

Scientists at the University of Warwick have demonstrated that a potential diagnostic tool for detecting COVID-19 using sugars will work with a virus rather than just its proteins, a significant step in making it a viable test in future.

Efforts to stem the impact of COVID-19 in low to middle income countries could be creating a health time bomb in their slum communities by deepening existing inequalities, according to an international team of health researchers led by WMS.

People who have been diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnoea could be at increased risk of adverse outcomes from COVID-19 according to a new study from WMS.

Researchers at WMS are part of an international research team that have been awarded funding by the UK Government to investigate remote primary healthcare consulting for people with long term conditions in Tanzania and Nigeria.

Researchers at WMS are involved in a new project that will examine the issues of resetting NHS services following the suspension of all but essential services during lockdown.

Researchers from the Institute of Digital Healthcare at WMG and WMS have identified known risk factors for mortality in adult patients discharged from hospital with diabetes.

More effective measures to prevent infection spreading within households are a vital part of preventing a second wave of COVID-19, say researchers at WMS and the University of Birmingham.

A new study by WMS researchers has found that mindfulness could help trainee GPs to build their resilience and reduce burnout, helping to reduce the number of newly qualified GPs leaving the profession.

A diet rich in plant-based foods can include a limited amount of animal products and still improve blood pressure, new research by WMS demonstrates.

Care Companion, a Unit of Academic Primary Care project, benefits from a creative partnership award allowing artists to continue their work during the COVID-19 pandemic through collaboration with researchers from the social sciences, arts, science and medicine from across both the city’s universities.