Children’s Emergency Care Consultant wins prestigious Liz Molyneux prize

Dr Andrew Rowland, Consultant in Paediatric Emergency Medicine

A Consultant in paediatric emergency medicine at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has won a prestigious national award.

Dr Andrew Rowland, who is based at North Manchester General Hospital, was awarded the Liz Molyneux prize by the Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine for his presentation of the Emergency Department’s research into a paediatric observation priority score.

The prize is awarded annually to the person delivering the highest-scoring presentation of original research work at the Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine annual meeting.

Dr Rowland said: “We took the Paediatric Observation Priority Score (POPS), devised in Leicester by the Paediatric Emergency Medicine Leicester Academic (PEMLA) team, and modified it for our own use in North Manchester.

“Called POPS, the system is a paediatric early warning system and a useful tool to predict the likelihood of a child’s admission to hospital from the emergency department. POPS is essentially a checklist which accurately scores acutely ill children on a combination of physiological, behavioural and risk identifiers, using easy to collect data.

“We also found that POPS is a useful adjunct tool to use in our emergency department alongside Manchester Triage and Clinical Assessment, which we have been able to translate into helpful guidance to use in the emergency department.”

Thrilled to win the award, Dr Rowland was presented with a certificate and cheque by Dr Kath Berry, the chairwoman of the Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine at Twickenham Stadium.

He said: “I was absolutely delighted to have won the Liz Molyneux prize which really means a lot to me as it recognises and rewards the work that I presented at a national level and will hopefully lead to other units or institutions wanting to get involved in this work. We’ve managed to achieve what I think is a fantastic result in this study in light of the fact that we conducted it with no additional research funding and no additional staff time to collect or analyse data.”