Excellence in Healthcare Education 2010 winners

Excellence in Healthcare Education

Category proudly sponsored by:

Recognising an individual or team who has demonstrated outstanding leadership and/or innovation in healthcare education and performance improvement.

Genuine experiences of patients and their stories should be the lifeblood of a good healthcare system that listens to patients and learns—something that underlines the work of the Patients Voices programme.

The programme, run by the Cambridge based organisation Pilgrim Projects, aims to allow ordinary people to share their experiences of health and social care. Set up in 2003 by Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner, directors of Pilgrim Projects, the programme allows these stories to be heard by policy makers and clinicians. The programme offers “digital stories” from real patients in the form of short video clips, still images, music, and a recorded voice-over by the patient, allowing the patients to educate and inform clinicians about the services they provide and how they can be improved.

Initially funded by the NHS clinical governance support team, the Patient Voices digital stories have gone on to attract worldwide attention. The stories are used widely as teaching and learning tools by the likes of the Royal College of Nursing and in schools of medicine and health care in universities across the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia. Pilgrim Projects says that the evidence indicates that the stories have a powerful impact when shown to clinicians and health service managers.

Pip Hardy says: “Winning this award acknowledges the effort and investment that, over the past six years, we have put into developing our storytelling methodology.

“This has helped to put patients back at the heart of health care and commissioning by giving them, and others who are not normally heard, a voice that can be heard in any lecture theatre, boardroom, or conference venue.

“We would like to thank the 400 plus storytellers who have participated in workshops, the sponsors and organisers of workshops, the educators who use those stories, and the people who provided music for use in the stories.”