Two dieticians at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals have won awards recognising the impact that their work has had on good patient nutrition. Sean White and Nick Trott won the Nutrition Support Professional of the Year and Coeliac Professional of the Year titles respectively at the Clinical Nutrition Awards.
White has been a Home Enteral Feed (HEF) Dietitian in Sheffield for 12 years, and also holds a number of national advisory roles. He led on the development of a toolkit that enables improved outcome reporting in nutrition support.
He has also completed a week-long challenge where he stopping eating and drinking normally and instead received all his nutrition through a feeding tube in his nose to provide an insight into the experience of patients who have to be fed this way. He produced a video documenting his experience.
Trott is a Gastroenterology Dietitian specialising in coeliac disease. There has been a large increase in the number of people diagnosed with coeliac disease in the last decade, and in response to the increased service demand he developed a Coeliac Group Clinic service and 90-minute interactive educational package aimed at newly-diagnosed patients.
A gluten-free diet is the main treatment for coeliac disease, and dietitian support is a key factor in how well patients adhere to this. All patients said they would recommend the Coeliac Group Clinic to other newly-diagnosed patients, and 98% said they felt it provided them with a better understanding of the condition.