Three ELFT teams were award winners at the Positive Practice in Mental Health (PPiMH) Awards 2021 which took place in east London’s Troxy venue in October, with further ELFT services being given the judges’ accolade ‘highly commended.’  

The annual awards ceremony is an opportunity to celebrate outstanding work going on across mental health services nationally, and has been a regular date on every mental health professional's calendar for over a decade now. 

The ELFT team leading the Community Mental Health Transformation project were joint winners for the Quality Improvement and Service Transformation Award. 

Elsewhere, the John Howard Centre’s Clerkenwell Ward won the Learning Disability, Autism and ADHD Services Award. 

And the Peer Support Services Award went to the Trust’s Telephone Befriending Service.

ELFT teams that won the accolade ‘highly commended’ for their work were the Luton & Bedford’s Crisis Pathways for the All Age Crisis and Acute Care category, the Trust’s Perinatal Services for the Perinatal Award, Clerkenwell Ward for the Forensic and Secure Mental Health Services category, the Bedfordshire and Luton Paediatric Psychology team for the Integration of Physical and Mental Health Care, and the Force Control Room team in Bedfordshire for the Seni Lewis Award.  The Community Mental Health Transformation Team were also highly commended for the Primary and Community Mental Health Services Award.  

Trust CEO Paul Calaminus co-hosted the event, alongside Tony and Angela Russell, co-founders of the PPiMH Collaborative. 

Paul said that despite the profound challenges of the pandemic, the evening’s event was an opportunity to celebrate all the innovative work that had taken place that mental health professionals and service users could be truly proud of. 

Tony Russell described how the standard and quality of entries for the awards is now ‘light years away’ from when it first started out.  

In closing the evening, MC Jake Mills spoke movingly about the many struggles faced by people with severe mental illness during the year of lockdown, and praised all those professionals in the mental health services who worked hard to keep support and services going at this most challenging of times.  

Summing up the night, Chief Medical Officer for the Trust Dr. Paul Gilluley said: 

“The annual PPiMH Awards are an opportunity not just to celebrate the great work being done collaboratively between staff and service users across the country to improve mental health care, but to also set a bench mark on what is good and outstanding practice. Thank you to everyone who took part, and well done to all those ELFT services and teams who won tonight, or were celebrated with highly commended recommendations from the judges. I’m so proud of you all.”