Active Together wins innovation award at Advancing Healthcare awards

Health Innovation Living Well with a Health Condition

Our flagship cancer prehabiltation programme, Active Together was successful in winning the “The #RightToRehab award for innovation” category in the Advancing Healthcare Awards last week. Dr Carol Keen, Consultant Physiotherapist, writes about how true collaborative working underpinned the achievement.

Active Together team at the Advancing Healthcare awards

The category was sponsored by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and the award was presented by its chief executive, who spoke of how Active Together showed “excellent collaboration, developing a truly multi-disciplinary, physiotherapist led team. Self-reflective, well evaluated, and adapting to any challenges that arose, this project has already started scaling and is demonstrably aligned to the #RightToRehab principles”.

This award for innovation rightly reflects the endeavours of many in the development and delivery of Active Together. The services we run today are the culmination of more than a decade of work from those who pioneered the concept, conducted early studies and trials, secured a bit of funding here and a pot of money there, championed the cause, took a risk on an opportunity, shaped an idea into a reality. Those who work in the services today are proud and grateful to walk the path that was previously paved by others.

Reflecting the collaboration that underpins Active Together, the award ceremony was attended by colleagues from Yorkshire Cancer Research, Sheffield Hallam University and Active Together teams from across South Yorkshire. It is telling that the judges noted and rewarded the close co-operation, shared learning and mutual respect that has been fostered across professions and spanning organisations, which make Active Together the outstanding success that it is.

It is a genuine privilege for us to have been honoured in this way by leading Allied Health Professionals from across the UK, and a testimony to the hard work of everyone involved in Active Together. Attended by Professor Suzanne Rastrick, Chief Allied Health Professions Officer for England, these UK-wide Awards recognise and reward projects and professionals in the healthcare science and allied health professions that lead innovative healthcare practice and make a real difference to patients’ lives.

However, ultimately Active Together is about our patients, and the difference we know that we can make to their lives. We all passionately believe that a future NHS should have more services like ours, so we hope that this award will take us another step closer to prehabilitation and rehabilitation becoming business as usual for patients across our region and beyond.

Prof. Rob Copeland, Director of the AWRC added, ‘This is a fantastic achievement and an appropriate reflection of what can be achieved when organisations and professions work together and are well led. Active Together is a team of highly skilled staff with a shared sense of purpose to create the conditions that enable people with cancer to prepare well and recover from treatment. It is worthy of recognition, and I am so pleased – and proud – of what has been achieved by the team. I’d like to add my thanks to everyone at Yorkshire Cancer Research for their long-standing commitment to the vision of Active Together and for their financial support in bringing this vision to reality.’