Prestigous award for Dr Keri
A former GP who pioneered changes to the way the health service tackles end of life care has won a prestigious award from the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Dr Keri Thomas, founder of the Shrewsbury-based Gold Standards Framework, was presented with the President’s Medal at a ceremony in London.
The award honours those who have achieved the most to promote the aims and objectives of the body.
The Royal College's vice-chairman Professor Martin Marshall, said: "Sometimes we meet people in our professional lives who are just completely, utterly and dare I say gob-smackingly inspiring.
"People who through their hard efforts have touched and changed the lives of thousands of patients and thousands of practitioners. Professor Keri Thomas is one of those people.”
The honour comes just weeks after Dr Thomas was appointed an OBE by the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace, also for services to end of life care.
Dr Thomas developed the Gold Standards Framework for end of life care in the late 1990s while working as a GP in West Yorkshire. GSF provides practitioners with the training, resources and support to deliver high quality care for people nearing the end of life.
Supported for the first nine years by the Department of Health, GSF was introduced into general practice in 2000, into the care home sector in 2004 and into hospitals in 2009.
The following year, Dr Thomas – an honorary professor at the University of Birmingham – formed Gold Standards Framework Centre, a not-for-profit enterprise based in Shrewsbury. This is now recognised as the leading provider of training in end of life care to generalists in the UK. Its reach now spreads internationally too, as far afield as Australia and Canada.
As a result of Dr Thomas’ work, almost every GP practice in the country now has a palliative care or GSF register.
She said: “It is a great honour and genuinely humbling to be honoured by one’s peers and this award is greatly appreciated.
"I would like to thank all of my colleagues, past and present, in our GSF team and others involved in end of life care, who have over the years contributed to this work with huge passion, energy and commitment. These awards are a way of recognising their work in striving hard to improve care for people nearing the end of their lives.”
She said end of life care had come a long way over the past 20 years, but there was still more to be done.
"By working together we are confident that we can provide even more people with the kind of care they wish for as they approach the final chapter of their lives – a gold standard of care.”
