Umbrella Health is delighted to be nominated for a Health Service Journal Award for "Community or Primary Care Services Redesign".  The annual awards celebrate innovation and best practice across a number of categories, with this year’s winners to be announced at a ceremony in London on 21 November.

Umbrella’s unique, outcomes-based approach to delivering sexual health services encompasses training, education and health promotion through a number of partnerships across Birmingham and Solihull, providing a fully integrated service for all its users.

Alongside its clinics, Umbrella provides services through pharmacies, GPs and partner organisations to deliver sexual health services to the heart of the community. This innovative model has transformed sexual health across Birmingham and Solihull.  Prior to Umbrella, services had been fragmented, treatment-based and mostly delivered in specialist clinical centres. Today, Umbrella’s focus is on prevention-based, community-focused services offering education and empowerment to users with self-care at its core, via the Umbrella website, which offers advice alongside appointment bookings, self-testing kits through the post to test discreetly at home and a service locator to find partner organisations on the doorstep.

Established in 2015 and run by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB), Umbrella Health is commissioned by Birmingham City Council and Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council to provide sexual health services to all residents in the area. With 10 sexual health priority outcomes to work towards, year on year Umbrella’s results have been impressive, driving up the number of engagements with the community and increasing the number of pharmacy initiated STI tests by over 300%.

Clinical service lead, Dr Keith Radcliffe, said: “This nomination is a reflection of the efforts put in by all involved in Umbrella and positive recognition that a radical redesign of services can and does work.  Our staff and partner organisations should take pride in the ground-breaking work that has led to this endorsement by the HSJ Awards.”

Both Umbrella and UHB will be watching closely in November for the outcome of this prestigious nomination.