Nurse Spotlight Award Winner - Karen Provan

We reveal the winner of our 'Nurse Spotlight 2022' Award as part of our International Nurses Day celebrations.

This International Nurses Day, we're proud to announce the winner of our Nurse Spotlight Award.

Karen Provan, nominated by Anja Katharina Guttinger, is the lead nurse of the Ayrshire and Arran’s Sexual Health Services and a member of FSRH. Her hard work and dedication, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, has had an incredible impact on both her team and community. 

Here's what Anja had to say:

"She has been an incredible leader in times of significant service change. Her leadership during COVID-19 was instrumental in the initial phase of lockdown keeping staff and patients safe, limiting redeployment to closely allied services and constantly responding to new guidance in a timely and constructive fashion. Karen is an excellent clinician, implant and IUCD inserter, PREP prescriber and is fully in charge of all nurse GUM aspects of the service including results processing. In the middle of COVID-19 she took over the lead of the newly deployed local SARC referral service and streamlined the embedding process on top of her existing duties. She has been incredible calm and constructive during all COVID-19 related rota changes, ensuring cover in a department understaffed due to long-term redeployment. She additionally ensured a much greater visibility of sexual health services in the wider health board. Karen lives and breathes sexual health. She is an incredible role model for the whole department. Nominating her for the nurse of the year award would be an opportunity to pay credit and thank her for the amount and complexity of work she is doing."
- Anja Katharina Guttinger

We're grateful to Karen for her service in sexual and reproductive healthcare. Nurses make up a significant amount of the SRH workforce, delivering much of the vital and neccessary work that keeps services running that support women and girls through the lifecourse. We're dedicated to supporting our nurses to continue to confidently deliver such high-quality, safe and effective SRH care to patients.

Our nurse workforce

We received a record number of nominations, and we're incredibly proud of how highly regarded our SRH nurse workforce is, continuing to provide exceptional levels of care despite the unique difficulties that the last few years have brought. We would like to give a special mention to our two runners up: Karen Stewart and Kim Leverett, who were both noted for their active dedication to patient care and supporting their colleagues in their training and development, regardless of the difficulties and challenges surrounding COVID-19 and redeployment.

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