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.