NHS staff from across north and west Cumbria are celebrating after winning two national awards.

They were recognised for innovation and collaboration at the Healthcare People Management Association (HPMA) Excellence awards, which took place in London.

The HPMA awards recognise and reward outstanding work in healthcare human resource management.

North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust won the ‘Innovation in HR’ award for the new workforce model that has been developed at the West Cumberland Hospital in Whitehaven.

The trust also made the top three in the ‘Working Smarter’ category, after setting up a dedicated team to tackle agency staff spending, resulting in £5m of savings.

This is now being used as a national example of how to save money while improving care.

Meanwhile the Cumbria Learning & Improvement Collaborative (CLIC), which unites healthcare staff from across the area, won the ‘Cross-sector Working’ award.

The new composite workforce plan was drawn up for the West Cumberland Hospital in response to serious gaps in the medical team in Whitehaven and long-running recruitment issues.

The trust instead sought to create a new model which would provide a sustainable clinical workforce to ensure the continued provision of services. It means that junior and middle grade medical roles can be replaced by suitably trained and experienced clinicians from a variety of clinical backgrounds.

Dr Katie Poulton, consultant acute physician in Whitehaven, helped draw up the plan.

She explained: “We knew we were simply not going to recruit into medical roles in the traditional way, so in order to provide a positive solution, we came up with a model which deliberately blends a variety of health professionals to make full use of their experience and expertise.

"The roles include advanced clinical practitioners, academic fellows, GP trainees and physician associates."

The CLIC team collected their award for bringing together health and care workers from all of Cumbria’s hospitals, community services, primary care and private care providers to offer training.

Christine Brereton, the trust's human resources director, said that winning and being shortlisted for the national awards will hopefully help to attract more nurses and doctors to Cumbria.