Kate Huddart – Unsung Hero Awards

Nomination

Award Category:

Corporate Services

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 :

Kate has been throughout the covid pandemic, been providing expert advice and help to all 70 practices in County Durham, initially through weekly but now fortnightly online tutorials and information sessions. She has had to adapt to using a mixture of Zoom and Teams sessions, to cope with the demand from practices, as the updates cover the essential ins and outs of Covid and flu vaccinations. These sessions have taken practice staff through the entire process, from setting up local vaccinations hubs, to training staff on giving and recording vaccinations, she provides information on the constantly changing vaccine delivery schedules, on alerts on problems and issues relating to anything covid and is the primary care link to Public Health and secondary care colleagues. Kate has been the conduit, that gets national updates and translates them in plain, simple practical terms for practices, saving enormous amounts of practice time trying to wade through masses of information. She has become the point of contact for anyone wanting to ask a question and all of this is being done while also participating as a vaccinator in numerous covid vaccination centres across the County that are short of staff. She has been instrumental in setting up our Melissa bus, a roving vaccination bus, targeting areas with low uptake identified by Public Health colleagues. Perhaps one of the amazing things with these virtual sessions is that they are recorded and shared with practices to view at their leisure, yet live attendance does not seem to have dropped, which is a testament to the delivery by Kate of a complex agenda. It does take a lot of time to absorb the wealth and depth of information and that's where the recording and slides from the session become invaluable. And through the use of GP Teamnet, everything you might or could possibly want is available via a couple of easy to navigate pages, taking the pain out of searching emails and the internet. The Q&A at the end of a session is a crucial part of the process and she has never dismissed a question as unimportant and is open and honest if she does not know the answer to a question, she says so but then goes hunting for the answer. Over the last year myself and other colleagues in primary care would have struggled to deal with the multiple challenges posed by the covid and flu vaccination programmes had it not been for the pragmatic support offered by Kate and her team.