Michael Lympany – Unsung Hero Awards

Nomination

Award Category:

IT & Digital

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 :

Mike has been the leader of our Critical Care IT team for many years and always demonstrates reliability and determination. He is exceptionally innovative and has used his expertise to enhance IT resources throughout the Unit. An example of this is how he has utilised raspberry pi technology to produce a patient board which shows the patient location and provide up to the minute the bed state information. His main role though is to support our clinical information system which is used to record all patient information, observations, notes and drugs, making us a paperless Critical Care Unit. He is excellent in his day to day job but the reason I am nominating him is because of his exceptional, support, work ethic and general contribution during 'Covid'. We normally have 20 Critical Care beds but during Covid this rose to over 60 in 6 different locations many of which were distant from the normal Units and included theatre recovery areas. As a non-clinical person Mike sourced enough licences, equipment and supplies to enable us to expand our clinical information system to every single bed. Not only did this require negotiation and business skills but it also required a phenomenal physical effort all on his own. There is normally a team that supports the electronic information system but owing to health issues it came down to just this one man. In addition as he was entering Covid areas he had to be fit tested and wear all the PPE that clinical staff wore, which I feel was very courageous of him and very remote from his normal role. He also supported all the new staff that came to help, ensuring they were issued with passwords and he produced a helpful booklet to guide staff who hadn't used a clinical information system before. He patiently answered all our queries, corrected any faults and was the troubleshooter for anything to do with hardware or software issues. This included being on call overnight and at weekends and he often stayed very late. Even more than this, and definitely not part of his role, he took an interest in everyone's wellbeing and besides being a great role model, he ran mindfulness sessions, created a relaxation room and provided additional wellbeing resources. I hope having read this you will understand how much he went above and beyond his role and was just a 'great guy' who helped us through the most challenging period of all our careers.