About the award
The RCPCH &Us Voice Champion Award recognises paediatric health workers who have gone over and above to support RCPCH &Us projects. The nominees are scored against the four core values of RCPCH &Us which provides a structure to identify and evidence the impact of their support.
Educate
Collaborate
Engage
Change
Anonymised forms are assessed independently by our RCPCH &Us young people’s judging panel. In 2023, we had over 78 paediatric health workers nominated for their work with / support for RCPCH &Us.
The 2024 winner
RCPCH &Us judged and voted on the 2024 awards and made the final decision about who the winner is.
The judging panel said:
We were so impressed that from a chance conversation with our youth worker last summer, how much you have been supporting engagement. You opened up your clinics to have our youth workers visit to help your children, young people and families feed into a national review on experiences of patients which was great. Then you said you wanted to learn more about engagement and you asked for training, coaching and worked with our youth worker to host your own clinic chat - always asking for advice, sharing your hopes and ideas and being advocates for youth voice. We hope that you continue to inspire us and your colleagues!
And the winner is…Paediatric Diabetes Team at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Congratulations!
Previous winners
2023: Epilepsy Specialist Nurse, Jill Conium was chosen by the panel due to her hard work volunteering across countless evenings, Saturdays and other times to support the work of the Epilepsy12 Youth Advocates, going to Birmingham to support young people at a national youth conference, and joining 7 year olds online to be interviewed about being a nurse.
2022: Dr Ambalika Das has been committed in her work to support young people to make good choices to stay healthy happy and well and have a voice by educating others and to build stronger communities together. Dr Das worked with RCPCH &Us to create and develop a youth social action project toolkit for use in schools and youth groups
2021: Dr Mike Linney has been outstanding as an advocate for children and young people. His commitment and dedication to the RCPCH Engagement Committee as chair where he has helped young people, parents and paediatricians to collaborate together on improving child health looking at children's rights has made a huge impact.
2020: Dr Camilla Kingdon was chosen for advocating for, and creating opportunities for, children and young people’s voice to inspire paediatricians at the RCPCH Annual Conference, joining young people to help plan their conference sessions and RCPCH &Us birthday celebration, whilst ensuring their voice is strong across the conference programme in 2019 and 2020.
2019: Dr Mike Farquhar was chosen for his work with RCPCH &Us young people over 12 months to help develop the NHS Rainbow Badge programme, including going to Herts Pride to run a market stall with the young people to support the development of the wider Rainbow Badge project.
2018: Professor Judith Ellis was chosen for her advocacy and support in helping to change how children and young people are seen and heard in RCPCH, working with children and young people to develop RCPCH &Us, and coming to enjoy project celebrations with them.
We would like to thank all those that support RCPCH &Us each year, and a special thanks to the judging panel for having to make such a tough decision!
For more information, please contact and_us@rcpch.ac.uk.