Several Charity funded projects have been highlighted as areas of outstanding practise, including the Injury Minimisation Scheme for Children (IMP’s), dementia care and the Playlist for Life project, Shared Governance and the Pocket Midwife App.
Chief Executive of Nottingham Hospitals Charity Barbara Cathcart says: “We are delighted that the CQC have rated the Trust as ‘good’ overall and we are pleased to work with such a progressive and innovative NHS organisation. The Charity has provided essential funding for many of the areas highlighted by the CQC as ‘outstanding practise’, which demonstrates the importance of the investment our donors have enabled us to make in these projects, without which they may not otherwise have been possible.”
The Charity supported Pocket Midwife, a free maternity app for mums-to-be which is thought to be the only maternity app in the UK produced by a hospital and contains general pregnancy information that is useful to all prospective parents and their families. It was developed with feedback from 100 pregnant women, who were asked what information they would like. Thanks to £30,000 of Charity funding, this project was able to progress and has gone on to win several awards.
The Playlist for Life project received more than £43,000 of funding from Nottingham Hospitals Charity, to improve services for dementia patients. This includes more than £1000 for iPods and music to help conjure memories for dementia patients, improving their mood, awareness, sense of identity and independence, whilst at the same time reducing anxiety and distress.
The IMP’s project teaches more than 2,300 children a year about first aid and resuscitation skills. Children aged 10 and 11 from city primary schools visit QMC for a morning and spend time in the children’s Emergency Department and elsewhere in the hospital, learning vital life-saving skills. The programme is run by the hospital’s Department for Research and Education in Emergency and Acute Medicine team and funded by Nottingham City Council’s Public Health team, with more than £14,000 from Nottingham Hospitals Charity. It began in 2001 and in 2015 taught its 40,000th child.
The Charity has also been instrumental in the roll out of the Shared Governance project, for which donors have helped to contribute more than £35,000. Shared governance is a management structure for nurses which empowers frontline staff to work together and make decisions that affect nursing practice and patient care. It involves teamwork, Evidence Based Practice (EBP), and accountability with the aim of improving productivity and patient outcomes.
Chief Executive, Barbara Cathcart adds: “We’ve been at the heart of care for patients at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust for the last ten years and this year we celebrate a decade of working in partnership with NUH, for the good of their patients. Thanks to the support of our donors, we have already achieved so much in Nottingham and the East Midlands, however there is much more we want to do to invest in innovation and improve services. We continue to work closely with NUH, while listening to our donors, fundraisers and patients about how they would like their donations to be used.”
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