The Porterhouse Medical Award for Excellence in Professional Education Programmes

Summary of work

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, debilitating disease affecting >100,000 adults in the UK. A patient-centric approach is crucial to optimal management of MS, due to varied aetiology and individual response to treatment.

OptiMiSe for MS Specialist Nurses is an expert-led, behaviour-change education programme that set out to support MS nurses in delivering this patient-centric management to all patients with MS. To better understand the barriers nurses face in providing optimal patient care, we developed a survey to evaluate their current clinical practice. Education content and format was designed using proven, behaviour-change tactics to address the identified barriers. To empower our target audience to make a change, nurses set personal learning objectives and developed action plans to implement their learnings in their clinical practice. A multichannel approach ensures that nurses continue to be supported in their learning journey and cascades the impact to MS nurses across the UK.

OptiMiSe has demonstrably changed MS nurse behaviour and driven positive impacts on patient outcomes, by enabling them to overcome barriers to implementation of patient-centric care.

Judges' comments

An extremely well structured programme, clearly based on deep insights that had a genuine impact on its targeted audience. It ticked all the boxes. We loved the story and structure of the submission.