Health and Safety Team, including the Mask Fitting Service

Nomination

Award Category:

Corporate Services

Individual or Team Nomination?

Team

Qualifying Qualities

In these challenging times, nominators were asked to show how the nominee had demonstrated the following qualities:

Exceptional work ethic - going above and beyond their job description, especially in the past 12 months.
Outstanding achievement/s in work or outside of the organisation where relevant.
Drive for innovation and proactive leadership in these challenging times.
High level of interpersonal skills, such as kindness, empathy, loyalty and thoughtfulness to staff and patients.
A resilience considering Covid to their role and to the health and wellbeing of their colleagues.

Nominators Answer

Nominee's story :

Health and Safety Teams across the whole of the NHS are often hidden unsung heroes but during the pandemic the Health and Safety Team at WWL played a significant part in helping to keep staff safe. Amongst various involvements, one of the Team’s biggest achievements was the co-ordination of the statutory requirement to deliver mask fit testing. With the help of non-clinical staff from all areas we deployed a small army who were trained to carry out an rolling programme of mask fit testing with frontline staff to the recent FFP3 make and model that was made available to us via central NHS Procurement Stores. There have been in excess of 8,500 individual mask fit tests carried out by the team since the start of the pandemic. The Team not only focused on its own WWL family but also Wigan’s Local Authority, including Care Homes, and Community Healthcare, Doctors and Dentists, and we continue to work with these services. The systems and processes set up for mask fit testing caught the attention of a national mask fitting service and we were approached to provide them with an insight into how we had achieved the number of tests and our above average ‘pass’ rates – they wanted to learn from us. The Team also worked in strong collaboration with our Infection Prevention and Control colleagues and Procurement services to ensure staff were appropriately protected as far as was possible. The Health and Safety Team advised on relevant standards for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE); advised on the efficacy of the kind donations of distillery produced alcohol hand gels and other hazardous substances; worked with the Occupational Health Service and Trust’s Tissue Viability Nurse to support and advise on suitability of products designed to soothe the sore broken skin of staff from the repetitive wearing of tight fitting respirators versus product compatibility with the PPE staff were required to wear. I am the Health and Safety Manager of an amazing Health and Safety Team, which now includes a mask fitting service. I believe that me and my team, and other Health and Safety Teams across the NHS, would be absolutely delighted for the recognition of the part they have played in the pandemic. Here at WWL, we work in an amazing hospital with amazing people, and we have stood together, worked together, and tackled this pandemic together, as one big WWL family.