Lauren Eyers – Unsung Hero Awards

Nomination

Award Category:

Apprentice of the year

Individual or Team Nomination?

Individual

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 :

Having successfully completed her apprenticeship scheme at the Trust, Lauren’s natural capacity to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously came to the forefront during the past 18 months of the pandemic. Her self-motivation, calm and efficient manner enabled her to multi-task on any number of requests for communications support simultaneously, from every corner of the hospital, while also managing her day-to-day workload. No task was too big. Lauren proved herself to be exceptional throughout what became an incredibly stressful period for the small three- person communications team. Single-handedly, Lauren took it on herself to update the frequent Covid-19 public health and staff information messages and posters such as PPE, visiting restrictions, hand washing and many more – including mass printing, laminating and then personally distributing them across the Trust. Known to change regularly throughout a day, Lauren juggled the regular poster updates along with supporting a much-depleted volunteers and charity team to manage and distribute the large number of food and gift donations as fairly as possible across the hospital which were arriving almost every hour. Working extraordinarily long hours, Lauren immersed herself and helped support her colleagues to help manage ongoing media requests, staff communications around infection prevention and control and public information around attending the emergency department and other clinics, Lauren still managed time to help deliver 1000’s of Easter Eggs to staff across the Trust! Head of communications, Emma said: “We simply wouldn’t have been able to have functioned or delivered on the level of communications we did without Lauren. She is an incredible team player and very self-motivated. To support the team, Lauren maintained an action log to record everything that had been asked of the communications team and monitored the team’s workload throughout the pandemic.” Due to the team being incredibly small and increased demands being placed on the most senior member who had also stepped up and taken on a more senior role herself, Lauren helped ensure the Trust’s social media accounts were regularly monitored and kept up top date with key messages and information for the local community the hospital serves. Having gone through the apprenticeship programme, Lauren volunteered to mentor the team’s new apprentice, and took him under her wing to support and coach him on the many aspects of acute hospital communications including internal and external campaigns. More recently, Lauren undertook the role of supporting, training and line managing the new communication team’s assistant. Laurens’s calm and friendly manner has enabled the assistant to settle in and become an intrinsic member of the team. As the communications team increased in early 2021, Lauren welcomed and supported five new members of the team settle and navigate their way around the Trust’s processes, IT as well as helping them find their way around the large complex hospital site. With regular interruptions to her daily workload, Lauren will happily assist and answer any number of queries asked of her. Lauren has been an amazing but unsung hero this past 18 months and continues to be today.