Southern Health and Social Care Trust announced winner of the 2025 Picker Experience Network Awards
The atmosphere at the University of Birmingham on Thursday, 2nd October, was one of pride and celebration, as healthcare leaders, innovators, and patient experience champions gathered for the 2025 Picker Experience Network Awards (PEN Awards). The venue brimmed with conversation, as health and social care colleagues from across the UK and around the world came together to celebrate the very best in patient experience.
Against this backdrop of inspiration, the Southern Health and Social Care Trust with their project ‘Seasons of Life’ was announced as the overall winner of the 2025 Picker Experience Network Awards.
Delivered in schools, ‘Seasons of Life’ recognises that grief extends beyond bereavement to include experiences such as parental separation, care placement, refugee status, and family imprisonment. Led by a multidisciplinary team, the trauma-informed initiative combines clinical expertise with creative approaches like narrative and art therapy and is inclusive of neurodiverse and ethnically diverse participants.
About the awards
The Picker Experience Network Awards recognise outstanding excellence in patient experience. They celebrate projects, teams, individuals, and initiatives that have made exceptional contributions to care, engagement, service delivery, and wellbeing from the perspective of patients, carers, families, and staff.
In April 2024, Picker acquired the Patient Experience Network (PEN), uniting two organisations dedicated to understanding, measuring, and improving people’s care experiences. This collaboration brought together Picker’s international expertise in person centred care with PEN’s long-standing commitment to recognising excellence.
PEN has always aimed to be practical, inclusive, and trusted, with core values of uncovering good practice, celebrating it, sharing what works, and encouraging collaboration across health and social care.
Voices from the winners and the awards’ founder
Congratulating colleagues from School Nursing, Paediatric Psychology, the Trust Bereavement Co-ordinator, Cruse Bereavement Support, and Quality Improvement — who worked with schools, and most importantly, with young people and families to co-design the project — Colm McCafferty, Director of Children and Young People’s Services for the Southern Health and Social Care Trust, said:
“This achievement recognises the compassion, creativity and dedication of our staff in supporting children, young people and their families through some of the most difficult moments of their lives.
The quality improvement pilot project reflects our Vision and Strategy — putting people at the centre, learning from lived experience and working collaboratively to deliver compassionate care. By responding to those who need our support, the team worked hard to create a service that developed resilience, identified a need for other services at an earlier stage and potentially prevent further issues arising in later life. The Trust will seek to build on this pilot project through collaboration with key partners.”
Ruth Evans, Founder and former Managing Director of PEN, said:
“Congratulations to Southern Health and Social Care Trust on this fantastic achievement. The Awards are always a special occasion and the day highlighted exactly why they matter. They demonstrate what is possible when care is centred around people — their needs, their voices, and their preferences. Since Picker acquired PEN, we’ve been committed to growing this platform so that person centred care can be celebrated and shared globally. This year’s winner inspired us all”.
To see all the Winners, Runners Up and Finalists from PEN 2025, please click here: https://patientexperiencenetwork.org/pen2025.
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Notes to editors
- For media enquiries, please contact Lucy Pickard at pressoffice@pickereurope.ac.uk or phone: 01865 632 235.
- For more information on the Picker Experience Network Awards, including categories, eligibility, and past winners, visit: patientexperiencenetwork.org/awards.
- Find out more about the Patient Experience Network: patientexperiencenetwork.org.
- Picker’s acquisition of the Patient Experience Network in 2024: picker.org/research_insights/picker-group-acquires-the-patient-experience-network-pen.
Picker’s team of researchers and data scientists are available to support organisations in understanding, measuring, and using workforce and user experience. For queries about our services or to request a call, please contact info@pickereurope.ac.uk.
