Congratulations Lynette Kennedy BEM! | News

Congratulations to Lynette Kennedy who has been awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) in King Charles III’s first Birthday Honours List.

Lynette, who is Nurse Consultant, in Camden Integrated Learning Disability Service (CLDS), part of North London Mental Health Partnership, worked tirelessly to protect people with learning disabilities throughout the pandemic. It is thought her efforts contributed to keeping service users and staff safe and protected, at a very difficult time for everyone.  

Lynette said: “I am delighted to be receiving a British Empire Award (BEM) for the work that I have done and continue to do to enhance the health and wellbeing of people with learning disabilities living in Camden.

I am passionate about partnership working between health and social care agencies, both statutory and non-statutory organisations, to address the health inequalities that people with learning disabilities often experience.  I believe that partnership working  is the only way to highlight the importance of appropriate commissioned provision and how important reasonable adjustments  are in our vision for equity of health outcomes and to ensure people’s mental, emotional and physical health needs are met.”

Knowing that people with learning disabilities are often at increased risk of respiratory infections and supported by research by Public Health England, which suggested that people with learning difficulties were at six least times more likely to die from COVID-19, she used her experience as a peer vaccinator to pull together a vaccination team made up of learning disability nurses and psychiatrists from CLDS to increase capacity, and worked hard to overcome hesitancy and reluctance around vaccine take-up.

Lynette worked with several organisations, including Camden Council and GPs, to ensure people with learning disabilities had access to the C19 vaccinations. She also worked with her colleagues in Camden Integrated Learning Disability Service to ensure issues such as needle-phobia, were addressed and that people with learning disabilities could be supported to understand the reason they needed a vaccine. She held face-to-face meetings with teams to dismiss misinformation around the vaccines, and her existing relationships with staff meant that she was able to have reflective and insightful discussions to support people to reach informed decision around the C19 vaccinations.

All this important, life-saving work, was done on top of her day job, managing a team of nurses and delivering clinical leadership across Camden. 

Camden Division Managing Director at North London Mental Health Partnership CEO, Alice Langley said: “I am extremely impressed and inspired by Lynette’s achievements. She has selflessly worked above and beyond to help others.”

The daughter of a soldier, Lynette has committed her life to public service. While she was in sixth form, she did voluntary work with people with learning disabilities, which helped shape her future career choices.  When she took her nursing qualification, she opted to train as a specialist nurse for people with learning disabilities, with the key responsibilities of looking after both physical and mental health, both in hospital and in the community.

Among her many career achievements:

• Shortly after joining Camden’s Integrated learning disability service, she established, and chaired, a multi-agency and multi-disciplinary forum to reduce the number of people with learning disabilities admitted to mental health hospitals. 
• She led a working party that delivered significant improvements in Camden’s Learning Disability Annual Health Check programme, intended to improve the physical health of people with learning disabilities. In the five years from 2013 the number of checks completed in Camden rose from 43% to 75%, making Camden one of the few areas to achieve this national 75% target this early.
• In 2016 Lynette worked with the new LeDeR Programme (Learning Disability Mortality Review) to pilot this developing methodology in Camden. Camden is cited by NHS London as having the best LeDeR performance in the capital with all reviews completed in a timely manner and lessons learnt from these reviews being integrated into local practice (see Significant 7+ below).
• In the Autumn of 2018 Lynette led a ‘peer vaccination’ pilot project to offer flu vaccinations to people with learning disabilities, their family carers and support staff. The effectiveness of this programme and the huge increase in uptake of the flu vaccination in both people with learning disabilities, their families and staff led to Public Health England (PHE) citing Camden as a model of good practice, to Lynette being invited to present this work on national PHE webinars and to all CCGs being recommended to consider developing a local peer vaccination model.
• Lynette worked with NHS England and NLFT to pilot the use of the Significant 7+ programme (originally developed to support dementia care homes) and worked with NLFT in adapting this tool for use by staff working with people with learning disabilities. Front line Social Care staff in Camden now report they are much more confident in dealing with health crises, they are less likely to call 999 when it is not needed so we have prevented unnecessary trips to A+E, protecting the NHS. More importantly we also have examples of how people’s lives have been saved as staff’s Significant 7+ training meant that they recognised critical health risks and quickly sought emergency help that saved lives.
• Working with Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust, Lynette has pioneered the extension of the new Trainee Nursing Associate role from generic nursing and into the specialist Learning Disability Nursing field.
• Lynette represents England as a member of the United Kingdom Learning Disability Consultant Nurse Network UKLDCNN on the Learning Disability Professional Senate
• Lynette contributes to the academic teaching programmes of both specialist and generic health care professional courses at the University of Middlesex.
• These innovations, driven by Lynette, played a large part in the Camden Learning Disability Service being named Learning Disability Team of the Year 2020 by the Royal College of Psychiatry.