News Highlights
Hong Kong delights
After reading Prof. Rob McSherry’s book ‘Clinical Governance – a guide to implementation for healthcare professionals’ the Hong Kong Hospital Authority invited the University to tender to deliver a detailed analysis of clinical and corporate governance across the Authority.
The Hong Kong Hospital Authority has a workforce of over 60,000 staff, manages 41 public hospitals and institutions, 49 specialist out-patient clinics and 74 general out-patient clinics. It has 27,000 hospital beds and about 1.4m in-patients/day patients per year.
The consultancy team comprised of Rob McSherry, Professor of Nursing and Practice Development and National Teaching Fellow, and Jenny Kell, Principal Lecturer in Service Improvement, both from the School of Health & Social Care, along with colleagues from PKP Consulting and senior NHS colleagues – a team which combined both the theoretical and service requirements of the tender.
The consultancy team interviewed a range of staff and managers from ward/department to the Chief Executive and Chair of the Hospital Authority and visited a variety of the Authority’s premises over a two week period and a preliminary report has now been presented to the Board.
Work and feedback is continuing with the possibility of further contracts around service development and practice improvement based on a series of masterclasses and the Excellence in Practice Accreditation Scheme (link).
EPAS Success
Three clinical teams from Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust have successfully completed the EPAS programme and will graduate from the University at the Graduation Ceremonies in the autumn.
The teams, all providing mental health services for older people and working in Easington and Hartlepool, Stockton and Middlesbrough and Redcar and Cleveland,
Why did it – to achieve
Support from Kevin Stubbings
The Pain Garden
A prototype of the Pain Garden was developed by a very successful partnership, supported by EPICC, between Professor Denis Martin and Dr John Dixon with Annimersion UK Ltd., a local design company specialising in animation and data visualisation, in 2008 to help people understand how pain affects them and connect them with others with similar problems.
Professor Denis Martin and Dr Alasdair MacSween from the Health and Social Care Institute have now been awarded funding from Arthritis Research UK to continue the work with Annimersion to develop a unique online educational tool to help people with musculoskeletal pain get a better understanding of the complexity of pain.
The Pain Garden will apply principles of data visualisation and metaphor to depict an individual’s results from a pain questionnaire as an interactive animation of a garden which will change depending on their score. The questionnaire items, covering sensory, emotional and wellbeing factors, will be displayed as 30 garden features to form a personalised Pain Garden.
The project will to help people with musculoskeletal conditions understand the multidimensionality of persistent pain in a fun and easy way benefitting both patients and health professionals.
Creative arts in health and social care
We have an exciting new and very active group bringing together creative artists in a variety of media and clinical therapists in a variety of disciplines to explore how we can use the creative arts for therapy purposes.
The group is currently looking at a scoping study for what is already being done to see what opportunities we can pick up locally or new ways of providing innovative services to clients.
If you would like more information or would like to join the group, please contact
Buzz and Business at the EPICC Annual Innovation Market Place 2012
The Enhancing Practice and Innovation Centre for Care(EPICC) held its annual Innovation Market Place at the beginning of May and was very well received by a healthy attendance.
The Market Place is the only event in the University that gives an opportunity for any one from any school or department who is working with health and social care issues and clients to showcase their work and the support they can offer in the field to both potential partners and organisations and to colleagues from across the University.
This year, there were 32 stalls demonstrating the wide range of work going on across the University, covering learning opportunities, research work, facilities available within the University such as the hydrotherapy pool, amazing initiatives such as role emerging placements for occupational therapists, and both staff and student business start-ups.
There was also a full programme of nine workshops on offer looking at current hot topics from social enterprise to end of life care and clinical commissioning groups.
All visitors who registered were automatically put into a prize draw to win a Kindle, with one of the student visitors claiming her prize just in time for her summer holiday.
There was also a lot of interest in the Medication Management Challenge, whereby visitors were given the challenge of coming up with suggestions to improve medication compliance and reduce wastage, with some interesting and wide ranging entries.
Contact EPICC now to make sure your name is on the mailing list for next year.