BMJ Awards South Asia 2016: Nominate a healthcare champion today

Nominations have begun

Awards will also be presented for Excellence in Medical Education, Research Paper of the Year, Post Graduate Thesis of the Year, Surgical Team of the Year, Healthcare Innovation of the Year, and Quality Improvement Team of the Year.

TheBMJ has already started to receive nominations. Siddharudha Shivalli, assistant professor of community medicine at Yenepoya Medical College, Mangalore, has been nominated for awards in the Excellence in Delivering Primary Care and the Research Paper of the Year categories.

“If our work is chosen, it will create greater visibility for our project,” Shivalli said. “I will also have the opportunity to meet other doctors who are doing exceptional work in medicine.”

Shivalli’s work focused on improving health outcomes in pregnant women in the Varanasi region of Uttar Pradesh. The project involved using media to improve dietary and iron folate intake during pregnancy. “Compliance with treatment protocols is abysmal in rural Uttar Pradesh, so we devised a strategy which involved interpersonal communication, endorsing the active participation of family members, and home based reminder materials with encouraging pictures and messages,” Shivalli said. Women in the intervention group showed improvements on parameters such as weight gain and haemoglobin levels.2 Shivalli is hoping to replicate this project in Karnataka.

What’s it like to win?

The BMJ Awards make a huge difference to winners. One of the recipients of the award for Medical Team of the Year in 2015, Ashalatha Radhakrishnan, additional professor at the R Madhavan Nayar Centre for Comprehensive Epilepsy Care, Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram, said that the award brought greater recognition for the centre’s work.

“Because of the award, we are getting requests for collaboration,” she told The BMJ. The centre won for its commitment to providing high quality and affordable care to patients with epilepsy.

“The BMJ Awards are a big boost for young researchers,” said Anbarasan M of Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, Puducherry. “Winning the award has encouraged many of my colleagues to apply this year,” he said. Anbarasan won the Postgraduate Thesis of the Year Award last year for his research on improving drug safety in intensive care units.

His research focused on identifying types of drug errors that happened during treatment of patients in intensive care, and developing strategies to overcome them.

Recommendations based on Anbarasan’s work are being implemented at the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research. The institute’s medication safety group has initiated training of nurses on handling high alert medications that have a narrow safety index.

It has also implemented some changes to systems, such as creating a common chart that is referred to by both doctors and nursing staff—thereby eliminating transcribing errors. A follow-up study has found that drug errors have been reduced by more than two thirds.

Outstanding commitment

Last year, the BMJ Awards South Asia received more than 900 nominations and honoured 13 individuals and teams.

Winners in three categories were from Sri Lanka. The paediatric cardiology team at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children, Colombo, won Cardiology Team of the Year; the Excellence in Medical Education award was given to the faculty of medicine at the University of Colombo for its project on developing and incorporating a module on professionalism and ethics in medical postgraduate training; and Mahesh Rajasuriya, of the same faculty, won the Healthcare Journalist of the Year award.3

The judging process

The closing date for nominations is 15 August. In the first phase of judging, entries will be screened by The BMJ’s internal team against criteria including relevance of the work to the region, ability to influence practice, applicability to unmet need, novelty and scalability, patient involvement, and future plans.

Shortlisted nominations will be announced on 18 September. A second phase of screening will include a detailed examination of the projects. Thirty entries will be selected as finalists.

These finalists will be invited to present their work to an expert jury on 18 November. In 2015, the jury included eminent clinicians, academicians, and public health experts from around the world. Among them was Jocalyn Clark, executive editor of the Journal of Health, Population, and Nutrition, Kiran Patel, medical director of NHS England West Midlands, and Samiran Nundy, former head of the department of gastrointestinal surgery at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.

Lavish ceremony

Winners of the BMJ Awards South Asia will be announced at a lavish ceremony to be held on 19 November in New Delhi before a select audience of clinicians and healthcare professionals from throughout the region.

The ceremony will be preceded by a Healthcare Improvement Summit, which will debate the accessibility, affordability, and quality of healthcare in India and hopes to consider critical issues affecting South Asian healthcare, such as primary healthcare, affordable technology, innovation, neglected areas, and new frontiers. See southasiaawards.bmj.com for more information about the awards and the summit.

How to nominate

• See southasiaawards.bmj.com

• Email southasia.awards{at}bmj.com for more information

• Call us at +91-120-4345733—38 (9:30 am - 5:00 pm)

• Follow us on fb.com/BMJIndia; twitter.com/BMJIndia

• Use the hashtag #BMJAwardsSA16