Amy King, Lead Pharmacist  for the Trust’s Tower Hamlets Centre for Mental Health, won the College of Mental Health Pharmacy award for the best Quality Improvement poster at their annual awards celebration on Saturday 13 October in Loughborough.

Amy won the award for producing a poster which outlined the Quality Improvement Project that she and her colleagues at Tower Hamlets have been working on, called Minimising Risk in High Dose Antipsychotic Therapy. People that take high doses of antipsychotic medication are at higher risk of cardiac events, and other side effects. Since instituting the changes, Amy and her colleagues have seen an increase in monitoring of patients on high dose therapy, with most wards now achieving 100% monitoring rates. The team have also seen a 23% reduction in prescribing of high dose antipsychotics. QI is used to gather and analyse data, encourage innovation, support staff and service users, test and measure effectiveness of change and scale-up successful projects on a Trust-wide basis.

On receiving the award  Amy said that ‘it wasn’t down to me alone. I work with a lot of very dedicated and dynamic individuals and this has been very much a collective effort.’

If you are part of ELFT you can learn more about this project on Life QI – Project code: 106269