Dean Street Express scoops top award

The innovative Dean Street Express (DSE) has won a prestigious award at the national Patient Safety Congress.

The awards, which are now in their seventh year, are held in Birmingham and sponsored by the Health Service Journal and Nursing Times. They seek to showcase health care schemes and projects which are making a real impact on improving the patient experience.

DSE won the award for Best Product, Innovation or Service, beating eight other health care organisations. The bid had been made with the molecular diagnosis company Cepheid who carry out the sample tests.

DSE is the fast access service set up at Dean Street 18 months ago and now seeing over 300 patients every day. In their nomination bid DSE says it has created a lean process with the most up-to-date and sensitive near-patient equipment providing accurate, on demand and fast results, reducing the average time for results from 10 days to two days.

General Manager for HIV/GUM, Pathology and Dermatology, James Beckett said: “We are delighted to be the recipients of such a prestigious award. DSE is proving to be a leader in the development of fast access sexual health services and other Trusts are now looking to adopt the DSE model. We now have over 120,000 patients attending the Dean Street clinic each year with 75% coming from outside the local borough. Yet, despite the fact we are extremely busy, patient satisfaction levels of good or excellent have improved and remain extremely high.”