Digital Champion Award

The Digital Champion Award recognises the work of an individual who has passionately promoted the use of technology or digital ways of working in a hospice or palliative care organisation.

The winner of this award has been announced at the Hospice UK National Conference.

2023 winner

Duncan Fleming, Mountbatten Hospice

The panel were particularly impressed with the collaboration shown on four pieces of work.

Duncan and the Mountbatten team collaborated on these both internally and externally, with neighbouring hospices and others. This collaboration showed innovative thinking in multiple areas, and an eagerness to share the work, and learnings, more widely.

This included exciting thinking about using digital to improve patient experience and safety. Projects included the development of electronic prescriptions, a new patient record app, using VR headsets to reduce pain and stress in patients, as well as finding ways to join up access to patient records across the wider healthcare system.

Importantly, their work is helping to develop future IT professionals through a mentoring scheme for students.

The Panel added: “Duncan and the Mountbatten team are worthy winners of the Digital Champion Award. We were particularly impressed with their collaboration with neighbouring hospices to share IT services and develop future IT professionals through a mentoring scheme for students. Their commitment to sharing knowledge and learning more widely stood out as an opportunity to improve digital services across the hospice sector. Congratulations to Duncan and all the team at Mountbatten!”

About this award

We are interested in hearing about individuals that have encouraged and supported others to use technology or digital tools and techniques to:

Identify or better understand and/or solve a problem (or be progressing towards solving a problem).
Improve quality or efficiency
Reduce barriers and improve access

The technology or digital tools and techniques don’t need to be cutting edge, but how they were used may be innovative for your organisation.

What the judges are looking for

What was the problem that you were trying to solve?

Why was technology/digital the right approach?
Why was this approach innovative for the organisation?
Did the Champion work independently or in collaboration with others?
How did the Champion engage other people in the use of technology or digital ways of working. This could be colleagues, service users, customers, donors or others.
If a particular technology or digital tool was used, was there a reason for choosing this instead of something else?