RCSEd announced the NTSP as winners of the MacLeod McLaren Medal in Patient Safety on 1st May 2026. This prestigious new medal strives to celebrate the efforts of multidisciplinary teams who focus on improving patient safety in either clinical settings or through research.
The medal has been made possible by Professor Stephen MacLeod (FRCSEd) who hopes that this medal will celebrate the contributions of the larger healthcare workforce in improvements of patient safety, and personally will also commemorate those who inspired him, including his Aunts, after whom this medal is named.
Dr Tanviha Quraishi-Akhtar is pictured with the medal. Tanviha is a Clinical Scientist in Manchester, a long-standing member of the team, and unfortunately, also a former patient (although she has made a wonderful recovery). You can hear a detailed interview with the team via our Podcast channels.
The NTSP prize abstract read: People with tracheostomies face avoidable risks both in hospital and at home. Our team identified recurrent themes with tracheostomy-related patient safety incidents and came together to try and do something about it, establishing the UK National Tracheostomy Safety Project in 2009.
Our multi-specialty, multidisciplinary, patient-focused programme makes care safer by addressing problems with training, staffing, equipment and infrastructure. Patients helped to shape the work by explaining what mattered most to them, including safer care, being able to speak, eat and drink, and getting home sooner. We collaborated with teams around the world to establish the Global Tracheostomy Collaborative in 2012, sharing resources and ideas. This cumulated in a programme that was tested in 20 NHS hospitals between 2016-19, involving over 1,500 staff and nearly 2,500 patients. Serious incidents were reduced by 50%, length-of-stay was reduced by 20%, costs fell by around £30,000/episode, and patient wellbeing improved significantly.
Our team delivered an NHS National Patient Safety Improvement Program during the pandemic and has gone on to develop a suite of resources to improve tracheostomy care, used by clinicians, educators, students, academics, patients and families all around the world.
About the medal: Professor MacLeod rightfully named the medal after his two aunts; Muriel MacLeod and Elizabeth McLaren, both of whom saw the introduction of systems which improved patient safety and inspire Professor MacLeod in his choosing his career through the stories they told of their experiences in the wards and theatres of the young NHS, two of which he has shared below:
“My Aunt MacLeod worked alongside Sir John Bruce, an esteemed past president of our College at the Western General in Edinburgh. At that time, it was not common practice to have counts and retained swabs were more common than they are now. Sir John made a practice of having new scrub nurses do counts and of them being wrong every time. When it came her turn to … count [it] was, of course, wrong. That was until, with great solemnity, she reached into the space between Sir John’s ample belly and the operating table with a long forceps and retrieved the swab. Counts became common practice [soon after]. It was an early example of the value of checklists and team drills.
My Aunt McLaren was the orthopedic sister at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow. The theaters in the “Vic” could get quite hot in the summer and the surgeons would find themselves tired and parched. My aunt worked with the nursing staff and porters to construct a pully from the orthopedic ward down to the theaters below and use it to deliver ice cream .... It cooled the surgical staff down … and as a result the orthopedic department completed more cases than other services in the summer months. It was an early example of the value of addressing staff wellness and the effect attention to wellness could have on productivity.”