Winner
Erwin Castro
Specialist Diabetes Nurse, East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust
Erwin Castro is passionate about improving the care of in-patients with diabetes through education, and has introduced various initiatives to achieve this, with the utmost consideration to the financial constraints currently facing the NHS. He is the creator of Diabytes, a bi-monthly IT supported update for trained nurses.
Castro is instrumental in ensuring that the various medical teams, from medical students to specialist registrars, receive updates on the management of diabetes in the hospital at which he works. He ensures that training for hospital nurses is provided on a regular basis, and has great rapport with the ward matrons which enables this process to run successfully.
Last year, he re-established the Diabetes Link Nurse system, which was abandoned years ago due to poor staff attendance. He worked closely with the ward matrons and was able to recruit at least one nurse from every ward to attend a four day in-house course on diabetes. He carried out a pre- and post- course questionnaire using the framework outlined in the Trend UK “An Integrated Career and Competency Framework for Diabetes Nursing” document to evaluate training outcomes. There are now more than 60 diabetes link nurses across the trust sites.
Castro is an Independent Nurse prescriber who co-organised a prescribing update on diabetes – “Conundrums of Prescribing in Diabetes”. This was attended by about 40 Independent Nurse Prescribers in the Trust, from every nursing discipline, and was very well evaluated.
He has introduced, with the help of the Pharmacy department, Diabetes Prescription Rounds, which is a weekly exercise to audit the prescription charts of ALL patients with diabetes in the hospital. The main aim of this is to reduce, if not remove, prescription errors in diabetes and ensure safe and effective diabetes prescribing. Another aim is to identify diabetes prescribing issues and use this information for tailoring the educational needs of both the medical and nursing staff.
About 15% of patients in the hospital where the individual works have diabetes, and he is passionate about ensuring that through education, these patients will receive the quality of care in diabetes that they deserve.
Judges' comments
"Erwin is passionate about ensuring that through education patients at East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust will receive the quality of care in diabetes that they deserve."