Colleague awarded OBE for services to children with cleft lip and palate locally and nationally
We are delighted to share that Lorraine Britton OBE, Lead Speech and Language Therapist, employed by Nottinghamshire Healthcare, was awarded an OBE for services to children with cleft lip and palate both locally and nationally.
Lorraine is employed by Nottinghamshire Healthcare but is contracted to work at Nottingham University Hospitals Trent Regional Cleft Network, based at Nottingham City Hospital.
Over 1000 babies are born each year in the UK with cleft lip and/ or palate. 1/700 children are born with a cleft lip & palate in the UK. It is one of the commonest birth anomalies in the UK
Trent Regional Cleft Network provides care to children and adults with cleft lip and palate and related disorders across Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley, Doncaster, Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Goole.
Lorraine was originally appointed as a speech and language therapist to work with children with cleft palate at NUH at Nottingham City Hospital.
Lorraine said: When I arrived to start on my first day there was nothing here. No office for me to go to, no desk, no toys, no PC (they didn't exist then) and no one to meet me on the first day. I wasn't even sure where the patients were. I had to begin from scratch to start building a service.
About a year later, after starting to develop a cleft SLT service at NUH, I was appointed as the lead SLT for the new Trent Regional Cleft Network. Again, this was an entirely new post and we needed to build a regional cleft network from scratch. I was hugely lucky to have some wonderful SLT colleagues already working in cleft care in Sheffield and Leicester who were generous in their efforts to help me with this.
Through our hard work over the years. we now have a dedicated regional centre at NUH (lovingly known as The Cleft Palace ), a small team of specialist SLTs based at the centre and a much wider team of link and community SLTs working with us across the 13 community SLT services, to ensure the children get the best possible SLT available locally to where they live.
We also have a wonderful multidisciplinary team including a great admin team, plastic surgeons, specialist nurses, audiologists, psychologists, orthodontists, paediatricians and maxillofacial surgeons, all going out of their way to do their best for our patients.
The SLT service is both aimed to prevent children with cleft palate developing speech difficulties and remediating them if they arise. Over the past 28 years Lorraine has led on a wide range of initiatives to help achieve these goals including;
· An annual family day at Sherwood Pines for families to meet up and children to do activities together
· Babble bags provided to every baby in the region to support babble play post surgery,
· Study days and workshops for SLTs, parents and school staff
· Running intensive SLT summer groups for school-aged children
Alongside setting up and leading the Trent Regional Cleft SLT Service locally, Lorraine has been responsible for leading the process to set up National Standards for speech outcomes. This has been crucial to improving standards across the UK and is now recognised nationally and internationally.
In the Trent Region 38% of children born between 2001-03 went to school aged five with no cleft-related speech difficulties. Over the last 25 years they have done everything they can to push this figure up. Lorraine is now incredibly proud that, 72% of children born in 2015-17 in Trent Region went to school with no cleft -related speech difficulties. This is a massive 34% improvement.
Similarly National Speech Outcomes across the UK have improved from 48% of children born 2001-03 going to school with no cleft-related speech difficulties to 61% for children born 2012-14.
Lorraine said: "This would not have been possible without the wonderful, collaborative team of SLTs and surgeons I work with nationally in other regional centres and The Cleft Registry and Audit Network (CRANE) who now support this work.
"I am hugely proud to have been a part of this journey over the last 28 years working with a superb team of passionate, dedicated people who always put their patients first, overcome organisational boundaries and strive for clinical excellence, at all times. This award is for all of us. I have always said my goal was to improve speech outcomes in cleft care until I worked myself out of a job. I think I may be nearly there."
Well done Lorraine, we are really proud of you!
*Photo credit - Nottingham University Hospitals Communications Team.
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