Charles Gutteridge to chair EHI Awards 2016 judging panel

Charles Gutteridge is to chair the judging panel for this year’s EHI Awards 2016, for which entries close next week.

Gutteridge is the former national clinical director of the National Programme for IT, who for the past three years has been driving IT at Barts Health NHS Trust as its chief clinical information officer.

He said he enjoyed reading the awards entries and attending the judging day because “it is always very interesting to see the presentations and to find out what is happening across the nation.”

“The awards are a great way of bringing people together, both judges and competitors, and enabling them to make connections,” he added. “They share ideas and talk and while, obviously, there is a healthy element of competition that helps to drive change.”

This year’s awards are being run for the second year by Informa. There are ten categories, for which submissions must close on Monday, 2 May.

There is also an overall winner announced at the black die awards dinner, which this year takes place on 29 September 2016 at the Lancaster Hotel in London.

Gutteridge chaired the awards panel at the judging day last year, and said he was pleased to be asked again, because he enjoyed helping to steer the discussion towards an overall winner that represented “a good solution for the time.”

“Sometimes, people enter good work on projects whose time is, nevertheless, passing, and sometimes they enter exciting work that is not quite developed enough.

“What we are looking for is something that is right for the moment. Connecting Care [the Bristol project to connect acute, primary, and other care records across Avon that won last year] was a good example of that.”

Other judges of this year’s awards include Beverley Bryant, the director of digital technology at NHS England, Andy Williams, the chief executive of the Health and Social Care Information Centre, the IT directors of leading trusts, and representatives from Digital Health.

Gutteridge is a former winner of the awards himself, as the trust won the ‘digital trust or health board of the year’ for its standardisation on Cerner Millennium in 2014.

He said this had been “a great reward for work that had been going on over a period of time” and “a strong incentive to do more.”

“That is the main reason for having this process,” he argued. “It gives people some well-earned recognition and hopefully encourages them to further achievements.”

The EHI Awards 2016: full details of this year’s categories and how to apply are on the awards website.