The Association of Healthcare Cleaning Professionals (ahcp) announced the winners of its annual Awards at a dinner and Awards ceremony as part of its 2017 Professional Leadership Forum last week (June 8). The evening was attended by over 100 guests, including HEFMA President, Tim Litherland and National Secretary, Alison McCree.
Seven awards were presented on the night.
The Cleaning Services Manager Award was won by Tatiana Blagorodnova, a Domestic Service Manager with Sodexo, who has worked at Hammersmith Hospital (Imperial College Healthcare Trust), for more than seven years.
Under her leadership, Patient Survey Results for ‘overall satisfaction levels for cleanliness’ have improved by 5% to 92%. For the period October 2015 to October 2016, a total of 2,511 joint Sodexo/clinician cleaning audits were completed with not one formal audit failure. Working to keep very old buildings up to the required cleaning standards is challenging but these results speak for themselves.
Tatiana leads her department with patients at the heart of what she does and has tremendous attention to detail, the importance of which she instils within her team. She has also demonstrated great ability to respond to unexpected events, such as the flooding experienced recently at the hospital.
Also shortlisted were Carlos Alves, Housekeeping Services Manager, West Suffolk Hospital and Julie Watson, Domestic Services Officer, Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber NHS Trust.
The Supervisor Team of the Year Award was won by Sam Richardson and Paula Ribero with Sodexo at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.
Sam and Paula have improved cleanliness standards in the spinal and maternity wards - two challenging areas - by leading and inspiring their team and successfully tackling issues as they arise.
Stoke Mandeville was a trial site for Sodexo's new cleanliness monitoring software. Sam and Paula helped shape the software to meet Stoke Mandeville's needs and are using information from this system to target change. Rather than completing 100% of the monthly audit on one day in the month, the team now complete 25% of monthly audits every week. The clinical teams are encouraged to join the audit and seeing the supervisors auditing more frequently gives them greater confidence that cleanliness is being monitored effectively.
The client is now furnished with information on issues identified in the audits and steps taken to resolve them.
The Hotel Services Supervisors Team at Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and the Supervisors Team at West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust were also shortlisted in this category.
The Working in Partnership award went to Julie O'Connor, Domestic and Housekeeping Manager with Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust. Julie set out to ensure her workforce developed in a way that recognises and embraces the extreme difficulties of providing services in a mental health unit. To encourage a more detailed understanding of the patient requirements in this environment she enlisted the support of Environmental Excellence Training and Development to create a continuous development proposal for her team.
The project was so successful because behavioural therapy understanding was bolted onto the beginning of every course to enable learners to grasp the fundamental principles associated with behaviour patterns, mood disorders, depression and anxiety. Strategies were developed to reduce the risk factor associated with working in an environment where patients are suffering with mental illness and sensitivities that are not always obvious need to be recognised.
Also shortlisted were Debbie Jones, NHS Property Services (NHSPS) & OCS and Hannah Turner, Sodexo at Central Manchester University Hospital (CMFT).
Individual Branch Supplier was named as Matthew Rea, Healthcare & Municipal Division Manager (Sales), Scot Young Research.
Matt has been Treasurer of the Midlands branch for five years and supports the ahcp by arranging the use of the SYR building to host Branch meetings and Development Days, including providing refreshments, which allows Association funds to be spent on the members rather than room hire.
He has worked with many of the members to develop products to help staff in their everyday work schedules and to improve the standard of cleaning across healthcare. During 2015/16 he took on additional work to support the Branch, arranging and planning Branch meetings, sending out communications, circulating minutes and attended two of the CoM meetings to ensure the Midlands Branch was represented.
Matt has also worked with the Secretary to develop a database of Trusts in the region, identify lapsed members and those that have never been members, as well as a database of GP surgeries and care homes.
Also shortlisted in this category were Stuart Powell, Key Account Manager, Newhall Janitorial and Amanda Turnbull, Area Sales Manager, Nobisco.
The Outstanding Branch Member Award went to Kelly Louise Smith of the Midlands Branch. Kelly was the regional co-ordinator for the NHS Waste Programme for ahcp members, funded by the President’s Bursary. To-date, she has ensured that 20 members have had access to the programme and completed it herself so she could advise others on the curriculum content whenever they encountered a problem. The positive outcomes for this programme are a fabulous accolade for the ahcp nationwide.
In order to increase attendance at Branch meetings, Kelly was responsible for introducing the successful Branch Loyalty Scheme. She has also sourced a stick-on mobile phone screen cleaner designed to advertise the ahcp, which has now been purchased at national level.
Kelly also co-ordinated and led part of the recent Study Day at Scot Young Research and personally followed up over 30 enquiries from potential new members.
Also shortlisted were Kerry Ord of the Northern Branch and Alison Pearce of the Yorkshire & Trent Branch.
The Best Branch Award was given to the Midlands Branch in recognition of the work done to boost membership numbers and attendance at meetings. This includes the introduction of a Branch Loyalty Card whereby members are awarded a stamp for attending meetings which is then exchanged for raffle tickets at the end of the year and entered into a prize draw. Social events have been added, a very successful Development Day held (in October 2016) and social media is being widely used as a broadcasting and marketing tool.
Runner-up in this category was the Wales Branch.
The Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Simon Sharpe, immediate past National Chair to recognise the work he has done for the Association over a number of years.
