NELFT’s Havering Community Learning Disabilities Team (CLDT) have won the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) award under the category ‘Psychiatric Team of the Year: Intellectual Disability’. The award was presented at the annual conference yesterday (09 October).

The annual RCPsych awards identify and celebrate outstanding RCPsych members and their work, as well as highlight pioneering projects working towards improving people’s mental health nationally and internationally.

Havering Community Learning Disabilities Team (CLDT) is an integrated health and social care team. The team have demonstrated excellent commitment and resilience under very challenging situations and have continued to offer best care for their service users. The team has ensured to keep their service users' voice at the centre of all innovations, by holding listening events and by being an active partner at the local Partnership Board. 

In order to be recognised for the award, the team had to demonstrate how they keep their service-users voice at the centre of all innovations. They did this by introducing a patient engagement lead to play an active part in all service development. The team engaged in a number of innovation projects including:

• New Ways of Working
• Transforming care programme
• STOMP
• Challenging behaviour clinic
• Physical health in people with learning disabilities
• Obesity work stream
• Learning from mortality reviews
• Use of technology in improving quality of annual health checks

We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the team on this amazing achievement.