Local nurse in running for national award

A local learning disabilities nurse could be in line for national honours with ground-breaking work to help people with learning disabilities access life-saving cancer screening.

Sam Screaton, a learning disabilities primary care liaison nurse with Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, has been shortlisted in the ‘Breaking Barriers’ category of the 2018 national Learning Disabilities and Autism Awards.

The awards celebrate excellence in the support for people with learning disabilities and pay tribute to individuals and organisations who excel in providing quality care.

Sam was nominated by a former colleague for innovative work with partners on accessible information about bowel and breast cancer screening,

The nomination for the cancer-screening work, which includes Easy Read leaflets and DVDs, highlights the scarcity of audio visual resources available to help people with learning disabilities make informed choices about cancer screening programmes. They found that uptake of cancer-screening services was lower among people with learning disabilities than among the population as a whole and held focus groups with service users before recording films to demonstrate what happens during breast and bowel screening.

Sam’s awards nomination comes just weeks after she won a competition to decide this year’s theme of Leicestershire’s award-winning Wistow Maze near Market Harborough – nominating the NHS who celebrate their 70^th anniversary next week. You may remember her talking to Nick Shaw on HFM.

Tonight Sam will attend a special gala awards night in Birmingham when the winners will be announced. She commented:  “I am incredibly proud to have been shortlisted for this award. This is by no means work that I have undertaken alone, and so really the nomination is about celebrating the work of a much wider team and celebrating the commitment and dedication of colleagues across a variety of services who strive to make access to health care better for people with learning disabilities. I am very proud to be a learning disability nurse working for the NHS in the year it celebrates 70 years.”

Good luck Sam!