A scheme that helps hospital staff to improve the care they provide to patients is up for a major national award.

The programme, run by the Quality Improvement team at Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, encourages staff, including nurses and healthcare support workers, to form and then apply ideas that make patient care better, on top of their daily duties and other improvements.

The programme that they run across Basildon, Broomfield and Southend hospitals has been shortlisted for the Quality Improvement Initiative of the Year category prize at the HSJ Patient Safety Awards 2024 in recognition of their successes in improving patient care and staff morale.

At Basildon Hospital the scheme worked with the renal unit to review staffing levels and see how working patterns could be improved for one of their services.

Linda Lio, Head of Nursing for the Renal Service, said: "The quality improvement process helped us to identify that we needed more staff for the Acute Dialysis service at Basildon Hospital.

"This quickly enabled us to change how we deployed our teams, meaning we can give safer care to our patients which made a real difference."