Rowan Hillson Award 2025 winner announced
A nurse consultant in diabetes and her team have been named the winners of the prestigious Rowan Hillson Inpatient Diabetes Award 2025.
Christina Lange Ferreira, from Wye Valley NHS Trust, has been awarded the accolade for demonstrating innovation in inpatient diabetes care.
The winning project is titled: Empowering people with diabetes to prepare for safer hospital stay.
Their project was part of SHINE Study: Developing an intervention for safer hospital insulin use for older adults undergoing surgery.
This study is part of Christina’s doctoral fellowship funded by the Foundation of European Nurses in Diabetes (FEND) at King’s College London University.
The SHINE Study aimed to co-design with staff and older adults with diabetes with lived experience of surgical admission, the model of a system-based complex intervention to enhance insulin safety for older adults across the perioperative context.
After exploring experiences of staff and patients, the study found that hospital insulin safety starts in the community, and that lack of preparedness for hospital admission and the need to increase accessibility of information warranted further intervention.
They co-designed two tools to address these gaps. These form an initial toolkit to address an existing gap in terms of patient empowerment before admission to hospital and include a two-minute video animation with ‘five top tips’ to prepare for a safer hospital stay.
The tools have wider applicability to people with diabetes beyond a surgical context. The tools can be found here.
Christina said: “We are honoured and delighted to have received this award. We are so grateful to all the staff and people with diabetes who contributed and participated in this project and made it possible.
“It has been very rewarding to see the value of co-design with researchers, frontline staff and people with diabetes working together on priorities identified by them, to create better and safer experiences of insulin management for people with diabetes in hospital.”
She added: “I am very grateful to FEND who funded my research fellowship and to my amazing mentors Dr Kirsty Winkley, Professor Angus Forbes, Dr Hellena Habte-Asres and Dr Jyothish Govindan.”
The Rowan Hillson Award has been running since 2014 and awards excellence in inpatient diabetes care. This JBDS-IP project is led by Dr Umesh Dashora. The submissions were judged against criteria by an independent panel chaired by Dr Rowan Hillson MBE FRCP, former National Clinical Director for Diabetes at the Department of Health.