Vote now for your champion of the year

The Healthcare ICT Champion of the Year competition is back! Voting opens today for this special category of the E-Health Insider Awards 2009, in association with BT.

We all know that many individuals work tirelessly to promote healthcare IM&T in different ways; through the education system, professional organisations, the healthcare system or their own individual practice.

The award is an opportunity to recognise one individual who has made an outstanding contribution in the past year.

A dozen nominations were made, of which seven people have allowed their names to go forward. In alphabetical order they are:

• Julie Brown, practice manager of the Woodland Road Surgery, Northfield, Birmingham.
• Phil Brown from FrontDesk.
• Mike Casey, director of IT at Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust.
• Howard Davis, the Audit Commission’s Payment by Results benchmarking manager.
• Steve Fairclough, head of health informatics at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust.
• Andy Inniss, control training supervisor in the A&E emergency control room, based in Exeter.
• Dr Paul Nathan, a GP from the Hollybrook Medical Centre, Derby.

Citations for each can be found on the awards website, along with instructions for voting.

Linda Davidson, director of E-Health Insider, said: “IT should have an increasingly important part to play in the NHS as it seeks to maintain quality while coping with harder financial times. It will be important to identify and promote success, and we think the awards have an important part to play.

"That’s why I’m glad to see that so many people have been nominated this year and that they come from such a wide variety of professional backgrounds. We wish them all the best.”

The previous winners of the Healthcare ICT Champion of the Year award have been Mike Bainbridge, clinical architect of NHS Connecting for Health, and Sue Rushbrook, head of systems and network services at York Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Rushbrook heard she won last year’s award by text message, since she was on holiday in Australia when the results were announced.

This year, we hope the winner will be able to pick up their award at the awards dinner, which will be held at the Grand Ballroom of the London Hilton on Park Lane on 20 October.

More information about the dinner and how to book tables can also be found on the awards website.