Southport NHS pain service joint second place for national award

Southport NHS pain service joint second place for national award

An NHS service that helps people living with chronic pain in Southport and Formby has been nationally recognised for making a significant difference to the people it works with by winning joint second place in a national award.

Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust’s Community Pain Service, in conjunction with Pain Clinic Plus, has been placed joint second from 18 finalists that were shortlisted from 300 entries in ‘The Good Help Award’ for being an exemplar of ‘good help practice.’

The awards which are run by Nesta, an innovation foundation, were launched earlier this year to recognise and reward organisations or teams that demonstrate they are helping people transform their lives by helping them develop their sense of purpose and confidence to take action.

Dr Becky Simm, Senior Clinical Psychologist in the Community Pain Service at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust, said:

“To have been shortlisted and then win joint second place is a fantastic testament to the hard work that our service and volunteers do to make a meaningful difference to people living with persistent pain, and in helping build people’s sense of purpose and confidence to act. Our ‘good help’approach has been developed in partnership with the people we aim to help and it is wonderful that the judges have been impressed by examples of good practice in our approach.”

The service was selected for combining clinical services with peer mentoring from ‘expert patients’ (Pain Clinic Plus) and peer support, including a volunteer-led wellbeing choir. Patients are supported to recognise their own strengths, build hope and develop their confidence and self-efficacy. As a joint runner up, the service has received £5000, which will be utilised to further the work that it does.

The Community Pain Service operates from Ainsdale Centre for Health & Wellbeing to support people with chronic pain. It also operates a volunteer support group for service users (Pain Clinic Plus) which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary.

Nesta is an innovation foundation that acts through a combination of practical programmes, investment, policy and research, and the formation of partnerships to promote innovation across a broad range of sectors.

Winners were announced on 13 September 2018. For more information about the Good Help Award, visit https://www.nesta.org.uk/project/good-help.