Blog: Why the Richard Driscoll Memorial Award is so important

Published: 15 Sep 2021

As the Richard Driscoll Memorial Award opens to entries, we speak to Kim Rezel, Head of Patient and Public Involvement at HQIP, to understand why it’s important.

“Patient and public involvement is integral to improving patient care and is at the heart of everything we do.

“When we talk about patient and public involvement, we are talking about working with patients and carers to understand how best to empower them in their care, and enable people and communities to become champions of change. We work to ensure that we hear the patient voice at all levels and encourage others to have patient input throughout their programmes.

“Through our engagement work, we’ve learned just how powerful information can be when it comes to improving patient outcomes and local services; from patients using audit data to campaign for local service improvement to parents using information from an audit to understand what they can ask for in their child’s care.

“That is why this year the Richard Driscoll Memorial Award will focus on the information that programmes produce for patients and carers – we want to see examples of co-production in how projects share data, treatment options and recommendations for quality improvement in local services with patients and the public.

“I’m looking forward to reading this year’s entries, along with my fellow judges, and celebrating the achievements made by the programmes to embed the patient and carer voice in their project resources. We have seen real improvement and effort made over the years and I think we will learn a lot from the different approaches to involvement used by the teams. Ultimately we aim to share the learning across the programme to help providers improve how they involve people to better communicate about their project so we can reach more communities to support them in their care.”

Find out more about the Richard Driscoll Memorial Award and how to enter here.