Trust’s IT lead nominated for national award

Christine Walters, associate director of IM&T at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust

Christine Walters, the lead for Information, Management & Technology (IM&T) at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has been shortlisted as a nominee for this year’s Healthcare IT Champion of the Year Award.

This special category of the EHealth Insider EHI Awards 2012, in association with BT, is an opportunity to recognise those who have worked tirelessly to promote healthcare IT in the UK; through individual practice, the education system, professional organisations or the healthcare system itself.

In particular, the reward recognises an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to their organisation or the sector in the past year.

Christine Walters is associate director of IM&T at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.

She joined the Trust two and a half years ago. At the time, the Trust was extremely paper-based and in many areas resistant to implementing technology. Yet it is now on a journey to develop a context-sensitive, clinically safe, electronic patient record system.

Christine has helped to build the business case, clinical engagement, and implementation plans for a wireless network, datacenter/virtualisation, digital dictation, a new theatres system, dashboards, e-rostering, e-prescribing and e-whiteboards, many of which have demonstrated improvements to patient care.

Christine is not only standardising the IT systems across the Trust’s hospital sites but also the way that clinicians carry out their duties. She also works avidly to feedback to suppliers on their products, to help her own trust and other NHS organisations, and is a member of the executive of the Health Informatics Benchmarking Club, which shares success in healthcare IT.

Voting will be split into two rounds due to the number of nominations received. Round one will include all 17 nominees. Round two will include the six nominees who receive the most votes in the first round.

Voting for round one will close on the Friday 24 August at 16.00. Voting for round two will commence shortly afterwards.

The winner will be announced at our awards ceremony on Thursday 4 October 2012 at the Grand Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden, London.

To vote for Christine, go to http://www.ehealthawards.com/champion-christine-walters