Our Annual Trust Celebratory Awards were so exciting and it was a great honour to present some of the awards to the wonderful winners.
We had more than double the number of nominations this year for the 19 categories and it was fantastic to recognise the fantastic contribution they make to the Trust and our communities.
The Shropshire Star Public Recognition Award is the only category that patients, families and members of the public can nominate and vote for in the awards and Ward 22 Short Stay at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital were crowned the winners.
They were nominated for going “over and above” as they cared for a patient at the end of his life. The citation praised the efforts of the “whole team on Ward 22” as they looked after a 90-year-old man, describing them as ‘hospital heroes’.
Well done to Ward 22 and as a Trust we are so grateful to our communities for their support – this particular award, is a shining example of that as it is chosen by you.
The Trust Celebratory Awards applaud the outstanding dedication and commitment of my colleagues and their teams, and the truly wonderful work that they do every day across so many services in our hospitals and the wider community to support our patients and their families.
We are also very proud of another one of our colleagues, Jan Bacani, who attended a King’s Reception at Buckingham Palace last week.
More than 400 international nurses and midwives attended the reception, which was hosted by the King, and Jan, a Senior Charge Nurse for Critical Care at the Trust, was selected to represent the region.
Jan was one of the first Filipino nurses to work at the Trust and arrived in Shropshire in 2001. The first clinical area he worked in at the Trust was the Medical Admissions Unit (now Acute Medical Unit) at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital (RSH).
It is just fantastic that Jan was chosen to represent us as it is amazing to see how his career, since he joined us from the Philippines, has developed at the Trust and how he epitomises the caring and trusted nature of a nurse.
The celebrations came as part of the NHS 75th anniversary and also to mark the King’s 75th birthday.
We are always looking at ways to improve the benefits for our patients and staff and it is great that the Trust is the first in the country to get a state-of-the-art radiotherapy training system at RSH.
Approximately 50% of patients will receive radiotherapy to treat their cancer and SaTH is using the £112,000 system to provide training for a range of complex treatments.
The system includes a wealth of training resources, allowing users to be transported into a life-size 3D treatment room, complete with a Linear Accelerator Radiotherapy Treatment machine.
The new virtual radiotherapy system helps us to provide an exceptional level of training, creating a safer learning environment for students and enables experienced staff to practise newer techniques.
It is such positive news that this will also help us develop a highly skilled workforce of the future.