Three health care initiatives provided by teams at Homerton Hospital have been shortlisted for prestigious national awards.

One of the initiatives led by the hospital's Palliative Rapid Response Team, has been shortlisted in the Royal College of Nursing's "Community and General Practice Nursing" category.

Led by practice development nurse Ronicah Makande, the team created a service within 10 days in March 2020, to deal with an increasing number of seemingly stable patients rapidly deteriorating and dying at home during the first wave of the Covid pandemic.

The service meant patients were seen within four hours of referral and given 24-hour support. Those who were scared to go to hospital or knew it wasn’t an option were able to explore their care options at home.

Two other Homerton initiatives have also been put forward in categories for the Health Service Journal’s Patient Safety Awards.

The Speech and Language Therapy team’s Get Hackney Talking project is shortlisted in the Health Service Journal’s “Improving Care for Children and Young People Initiative of the Year” category for its innovative work with children and young people throughout the pandemic.

The team developed computer based therapy packages and delivered an almost entirely virtual service.

The Covid-19 Deterioration Project: Real Time Triage and Tracking is shortlisted in the “Deteriorating Patients and Rapid Response Initiative of the Year” category.

A team led by Dr Carlo Prina and Dr Yvonne Mitchell created the project designed to aid in the triage and prioritisation of critical care reviews in deteriorating patients suffering from Covid-19 outside of intensive care and high dependency environments.

The project was responding to a 600 per cent increase in Covid-19 cases over December 2020 and the increasing amount of patients requiring critical care triage.

Homerton's chief nurse Catherine Pelley said: “Warm congratulations to all three teams for their nominations in these prestigious awards.

"Each initiative reflects a flexible and innovative approach to providing safe and high quality services to our most vulnerable patient groups during what has been the most challenging period in the history of the NHS.”

Winners will be announced later this year.