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The award recognises excellence in innovation, best practice and safety and the winning team is awarded a £2000 bursary to support education, resources or programmes which enable personal development.

Emma McCone, senior sister at the Freeman Hospital said: “We are absolutely delighted to be awarded Perioperative team of the year. The MDT approach to pre assessment incorporates all grades of staff and a well -defined pathway in multiple directorates to ensure our patients are safely assessed for elective surgery.

“The team have worked hard to incorporate existing resource and new innovations to help promote better life style and optimisation for our patients in the weeks preceding surgery, during and post surgery. I am immensely proud and confident the hard work will continue. I would like to pay a special thanks to my HCAs and AP for their input into the project”

The team based at both the Royal Victoria Infirmary and Freeman Hospitals were recognised for their work devising the pre op Health Improvement and Optimisation Programme (HIP-OP) an innovative programme designed to optimise patients before elective joint surgery.

Emma explains: “The hip and knee joint pathway can be quite lengthy from the point of referral and pre-assessment tends to be something that is done only a couple of weeks before the surgical date and at this point it is often too late to optimise chronic health conditions like anaemia, diabetes, smoking or hypertension – which can often lead to prolonged length of stays and poorer outcomes post operatively.

“Earlier assessment can often mean that infection screening can run out of date so getting the optimal time for pre assessment is key.”

Early screening can help identify problems in five key target areas; smoking cessation, blood pressure control, atrial fibrillation, diabetes and anaemia. The time that patients are on the waiting list can be used for both patient ownership of their health, but also where we can give advice for acute/chronic conditions.

The team are half way through the pilot programme but are already seeing positive results where changes are having huge benefits for patient safety.

The HIP- OP initiative is one of the many projects in quality improvement and research for the Peri Operative team on both sites and their enthusiasm is spreading across the North East hospitals. The external TEPOT network (Training and Education of Peri Operative Teams) an initiative founded at NUTH is growing within the region and is a platform to share and promote in best Peri Operative practice.

The team will be presented with their award in York on 9 August 2018.