Search is on to find the "next generation" of Florence Nightingales

Guy’s and St Thomas’ this week celebrated the launch of the “Nightingale Nurse Award”, a new professional award to recognise its most outstanding nurses.

Named in honour of the pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale, who established her first nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital in 1860, the award is unique to the Trust.

The launch event at St Thomas’ on Wednesday 13 September was attended by over 200 nurses, and included a procession of the Florence Nightingale lamp, on loan to the Trust from the Florence Nightingale Museum.

Dame Eileen Sills, Chief Nurse at Guy’s and St Thomas’, said: “I am so proud of our Nurses and Midwives here at Guy’s and St Thomas’. They do fantastic work day in, day out, and always put our patients first. To be able to recognise our most outstanding Nurses and Midwives with the Nightingale Nurse Award is incredibly important, and helps us build on our reputation as one of the best places to work as a nurse or midwife.”

The Nightingale Nurse Award includes the completion of a work based learning module, fully funded at either level 6 or 7, and will give staff the opportunity to start or complete their master’s programme. Importantly, on completion they will be honoured with the title of being a ‘Nightingale Nurse’. The first awards will be made to staff in May 2018, and the project is supported by King’s College London.

The Nightingale Nurse Award is part of the Nightingale Academy at Guy’s and St Thomas’ which was launched in 2016 to provide a platform for innovation, practice and service development in clinical nursing and midwifery. This work falls under the Trust’s 2020 strategy for Nursing and Midwifery that sets an ambitious target to have a waiting list of nurses and midwives who want to work at the Trust by 2020.

Fiona Hibberts, Consultant Nurse, and lead for the Nightingale Academy, said: “Our launch events this week, mark the beginning of a new page in our history. As part of our hospitals’ rich heritage, and as the site of Florence Nightingale’s first nursing school, we want to build on her legacy of providing evidence based, skilled care, delivered in a caring and compassionate manner.”