The Collaboration Award
This project focused on delivery of medicines to the most vulnerable people in society during COVID-19 lockdown through a Wales-wide new prescription delivery service.The NationalVolunteer Prescription Delivery Scheme and the Royal Mail Service were designed and implemented to supplement capacity and resilience of pre-existing medicine delivery arrangements, operated by community pharmacies and dispensing doctors in Wales.The scheme was designed to address an increased demand resulting from measures taken to reduce the spread of coronavirus. Devised and established within just five weeks of shielding being introduced in Wales, a total of 7,984 medicines deliveries were made between May and September 2020.
The PPE Portal is an outstanding innovation that has been developed in partnership with the armed services, eBay, Clipper Logistics,Volo Commerce and Royal
Mail to develop a service from scratch, to respond to the extra need for PPE for primary and social care providers which has arisen as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a standing start in March, the team have onboarded just under fifty thousand providers and distributed more than 1.2 billion items of PPE to critical front line services.
The PPE Portal partnership not only spans the boundaries of the public and private sector, but also traverses national borders, collaborating with the EU to gain EU State Aid for £1.3 billion within two months, to ensure PPE is free for those who need it most.
On the 22 March 2020, the government introduced new shielding health guidance and a support offer to help protect the people most vulnerable to COVID-19.
What made this task truly remarkable was not only the scale and pace of the programme, but the unprecedented collaboration across MHCLG, DHSC, NHSE, NHSD, GDS, DEFRA, DWP, CO, local government and local delivery partners. Over four months, 2.2 million people were contacted by the programme, 1.2 million signed up to the website, and 4.7 million food boxes were delivered to over 500,000 people, with every department pulling together to help protect people’s health.
Recognising excellent collaboration that spans the boundaries between sectors, administrations, or layers of government.