Awards and Prizes - Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre

Newcastle Researcher awarded MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship

Newcastle Researcher Wins Prestigious Prize

Newcastle Researchers win Jain Foundation’s 2024 Dysferlin Conference Awards

Newcastle team wins National Excellence in Clinical Audit Awards 2026

Informatics and Precision Care for an Ageing Population Theme Member Dr Daniel Weiand, Theme Co-Lead Professor Chris Plummer and colleagues from the Data Science and Infection Prevention and Control Team at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust won the Innovation Award at the National Excellence in Clinical Audit Awards 2026.

The awards are part of the Clinical Audit Awareness Week (CAAW), which was held 22-26 June 2026 and are designed to celebrate the individuals and teams who are transforming healthcare through rigorous clinical audit and evidence-informed improvement projects. It comprises of different categories like strategic impact, equity and patient involvement, innovation, patient safety, evidence into practice, use of national clinical audit and communicating for impact.

The Innovation Award

The Newcastle team was recognised for its project, “Reproducible Analytical Pipeline (RAP) for Rapid, Sustained and Statistically-Significant Improvement in MRSA Admission Screening Compliance” in the category innovation. The Innovation Award recognises clinical audit and improvement projects that use healthcare data in new and creative ways to improve patient care, including through digital tools, analytics and artificial intelligence.

The project team included Daniel Weiand, Paul Bradley, Caroline Cullerton, Geoff Dines, Joanne Field, Peta Le Roux, Jamie Lupton, Julie Samuel and Chris Plummer, bringing together medical microbiology, infection prevention and control, data science and information services.

The project was delivered at the NIHR BRC’s partner Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The NIHR BRC supported Dr Weiand’s clinical informatics work and his research. He was also awarded funding earlier this year that seeks to cover any future Article Processing Charges (APCs).

Dr Weiand said: “This award is a testament to the power and potential of collaboration, data science, and open-source methods in the NHS. I’m hopeful it will help strengthen the case for continued investment in data science capability, which we know can deliver real benefits for patients and staff.”

This national recognition is a fantastic achievement for the project team, and reflects their commitment to innovation, clinical excellence and continuous improvement in healthcare.

About the project

The team created a simple and reliable system that automatically checks each week whether hospital patients who should have an MRSA screening test when they are admitted have actually received one. The system brings together patient and laboratory information and produces secure reports that show staff exactly which patients still need action.

The reports help teams identify and address missed screenings quickly. They also use charts to show whether changes in performance are real improvements or just normal week-to-week fluctuations.

Between 7 January 2025 and 16 June 2026, the system ran successfully in 75 out of 77 weeks (97.4% of the time). During this period, it helped drive rapid, lasting, and statistically significant improvements in MRSA admission screening across the Trust.

One standout example was the RVI Assessment Suite. In early February 2026, it was not among the top 10 performing areas for MRSA screening. By 16 June 2026, it had become the highest-performing location in the Trust.

The main learning is that routinely-collected healthcare data, which often exists is disparate silos that have never been linked, become much more useful when they are carefully triangulated to produce timely, trusted and actionable metadata, synthesised by means of a Reproducible Analytical Pipeline (RAP). The project also shows that cost-effective, fully open-source software (FOSS) can support secure, transparent and scalable quality improvement within the NHS.

A case study has been published by Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP).

To the case study