The Viral Hepatitis Team at Leeds Teaching Hospitals (LTHT) and West Yorkshire Hepatitis C ODN are the National winners of the Health Equalities Award category of the NHS Parliamentary Awards 2020 for their ‘Street Outreach Initiative for Hepatitis C’. The team originally won the North East and Yorkshire Regional award and were put forward with eight other regional winners for the national award.
On Wednesday 7th July 2021 the awards ceremony took place in London, LTHT was represented as a regional winner in three categories in the awards,
- Wellbeing at Work, Future You Programme;
- NHS Rising Star Award, Emily Lane (Ward J20 at St James’s Hospital) and
- The Health Equalities Award, Street Outreach Initiative for Hepatitis C, LTHT and West Yorkshire HCV ODN.
The Viral Hepatitis Team won the national award for our initiative and Tracey Stirrup Clinical Nurse Specialist attended the awards on behalf of the team and received the award.
The Street Outreach Initiative was an opportunistic project during the Covid-19 first national lockdown between LTHT viral hepatitis nurses, Bevan Healthcare outreach team and The Hepatitis C Trust. The focus of the initiative was the hard to engage vulnerable adults (rough sleepers) in the community who were placed in hotels around the city, providing an ideal opportunity to engage, test and treat this group for hepatitis C as well as looking after their general health and wellbeing. For more information about the awards click the following link: https://nhsparliamentaryawards.co.uk/winners
