Frailty Team highly commended for patient safety work | News centre

Surrey Downs Health & Care Partnership’s (SDHCP) Frailty team are runners-up in a prestigious national safety award.

The team achieved Highly Commended in the HSJ Patient Safety Awards 2022 in the Improving Care for Older People initiative of the year at the Awards event this week (24 Oct).

The team’s entry focused on the development of a system wide Integrated Frailty Service, that allows people to receive reactive and proactive gold standard treatment for frailty, whether that be in the acute hospital or in their home.

Across the service, they work as one team and a multidisciplinary team working is at the core. It provides many opportunities for cross professional review and learning, allows for joint decision making and maintenance of patient safety. Both education and a strong emphasis of working as one team has helped support a culture change in how the team identify and manage frailty. Whilst reactive services have often been at the forefront of peoples’ mind, the team have been able to incorporate more proactive work and align the two, therefore offering better continuity of care and benefits across the system.

The team is jointly led by Clinical Directors for SDHCP’s Frailty services Dr Christopher Sin Chan, Consultant Geriatrician and Physician and Dr Malin Farnsworth, Consultant Geriatrician and Physician.

They said “We are extremely proud to have received a High Commendation from the judges – it’s a testament to the continued hard work and dedication of the whole team in delivering high quality care to our local population. We hope that by demonstrating this at such a prestigious event it awareness is raised of the benefits of a system wide integrated approach towards managing frailty”.

SDHCP was initially shortlisted despite the tough competition from hundreds of applicants and came highly commended by the judges against a shortlist of eight other organisations within the category.