Team of the Year award for Norfolk hospital's theatre staff

The emergency theatre team at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital has won £20,000 in a prestigious national competition that has seen them named Team of The Year.

The NNUH emergency theatre team has just won a major national competition, organised by the Association for Perioperative Practice, sponsored by Molnlycke Health Care, and will receive a prize of £20,000 for educational purposes for the theatre team to share.

The award came for a project that involved the team developing an in-house electronic booking scheme for emergency patients that replaced the previous paper-based system. The old handwritten theatre lists carried risks associated with legibility and patient confidentiality.

So consultant anaesthetist Dr David Wilson-Nunn with help from IT web manager David Chapman, and theatre clinical leader Zbys Kaznowski, developed an electronic booking system that was introduced in February. The programme runs on the hospital Intranet, and clinical theatre staff are able to access the system from any hospital computer to book patients and see the current status of the theatre list.

Dr Wilson-Nunn said: “Not only have we improved patient safety, but the system has proved invaluable in acting as a communication tool. We are now able to tell from a quick glance at the system which patients have been assessed by anaesthetists, which ones require further investigation and made handovers much more efficient.”

The system has also recently been enhanced for the orthopaedic trauma theatre team who now use a “point-and-click” system so surgeons can categorise fractures according to an international classification system. The system can take the user to an internet resource with information about management of particular fractures.

The NNUH team will be presented with their award at the forthcoming annual AfPP congress in Harrogate on 10th and 11th October.