Emergency and Critical Care

Nurses working in emergency and critical care deal with patients whose very survival depends on their care. These nurses need high levels of skill and expertise, and the ability to think and act quickly in a crisis.

This award is open to individual nurses or teams working in the NHS or independent sector who can demonstrate performance that has contributed to a significant improvement in the quality of patient care in emergency or critical care settings.

Examples might include initiatives to:

Set up services to meet the needs of specific patient groups or address specific injuries or conditions
Improve the experiences of patients in the critical care setting or their families
Improve collaboration between emergency or critical settings and other areas of care

Each entry will be judged against the following criteria:

• Innovation: originality of the idea
• Value: impact of the initiative on patient care and/or service effectiveness
• Patient focus: evidence that patient/service user need was central to the work
• Collaboration: evidence of the involvement of other professionals, services and/or patients in the project
• Clinical effectiveness: data demonstrating how this initiative drives clinical enhancements
• Leadership: evidence of entrants championing their innovation in their organisation or more widely
• Adaptability: ideas that could be adapted for use elsewhere in entrants’ organisations or other organisations
• Sustainability: initiatives that can be embedded within organisations to operate without the input of the people who developed them