News Item
On Friday UKAS closed our first virtual Technical Conference with our Recognition and Awards ceremony which was dedicated to the celebration of the tremendous achievements our staff and contracted assessors and technical experts have all made in the last year.
There were awards designed to recognise both assessment team members and our internal support teams, who have gone the extra mile to support our colleagues, customers and stakeholders in the challenging and eventful year that was 2021.
We would like to congratulate all of the nominees and the worthy winners for these awards are listed below:
Dave has made exceptional progress in his short time at UKAS, having been signed off as a lead assessor and technical assessor in under three months. Dave has also been instrumental in facilitating assessments in instances of staff absence, helping our customers maintain their accreditation in spite of the various challenges of 2021.
Zachary has been invaluable in the ongoing COVID-19 Private Provider work. He takes real pride in his work which is accurate, delivered on time to a high standard. He has learnt very quickly and been very supportive to colleagues. Zak uses his initiative to go over and above, always without complaint. He is creating great relationships within the team, with the assessors and also external parties like DHSC/UKHSA and is a very valued and member of the Customer Service Team.
Katherine is such a support to everyone around her in the Forensics Team and makes sure we are thorough but balanced in our assessments and that we provide the best service for the Forensics industry as a whole.
Ryan goes above and beyond within his CLO role and duties whilst taking on additional responsibilities in his interim ATL role as well as completing various tests and trials for a variety of IT projects. The amount of respect he has rightfully earned by both his line reports and colleagues around him is something to be proud of.
George has done a fantastic job of supporting the asbestos sector and also taken on a large CAB transferred from the corporate team. George has been instrumental in the transition of over 180 CABs to new HSG 248 guidance. This process has included supporting AMs from across UKAS, working to develop guidance for TAs and liaise with our internal colleagues to process the transitions. George has also conducted an additional AM induction programme due to high recruitment needs outside his section, whilst continuing to deliver training courses.
Helen has worked with colleagues on a large multisite reassessment and an additional large multisite ETS, to define an appropriate assessment approach that ensures coverage of all aspects of the service without involving excessive effort and cost to the customer. She has also been very active with COVID-19 PCR assessments, completing as many assessments as she has been able to, including suggesting changes to assessment approaches, and streamlining of visit bookings to maximise her availability.
Sarah has been moved onto secondment to support strategic projects and has provided invaluable knowledge and understanding across these whilst continuing to support across AFLA, the CLO and OST teams in 2021. She has provided the new AFLA Section Head amazing support and information to perform her role effectively. Throughout 2021 Sarah has listened to all AFLA queries and provided prompt and useful responses, training material and support.
It must be widely acknowledged that all of the Healthcare team have been working tirelessly to service the accreditation of private providers, but Hardeep has been consistently identified as having delivered to an exceptionally high standard and always has the customers at the forefront of her thoughts. Hardeep has a fantastic attitude with a constructive and positive outlook.
Chris has been awarded for his support as as Technical Assessor for LAB 51, reviewing, contributing and refining the document and its subsequent assessment and supporting Fran on the many assessments to provide consistency. Despite attempts to reduce his workload to retire, Chris has taken on more than ever to support the assessments and Fran in this critical stage in 2021 and into 2022.
John has been nominated for his dedicated involvement in a 3-Year EU-funded project that produced a compendium of worked uncertainty examples. John led on one of three workstreams to produce examples that will undoubtedly provide considerable help to those trying to determine uncertainty of measurements. The compendium was published free of charge in June 2021, and is proving an extremely valuable resource in the production of standards, guidance and training material.
Throughout 2021 Elizabeth has continued to rise to every challenge, time and time again demonstrating the agility to innovate by making incremental and continual improvements to our business processes that underpin our success as an organisation. It is for this reason that it was felt that Elizabeth is a worthy winner of this award for the second year running.
Phil’s contribution to the AuditComply project, as a member of the project governance board has been simply excellent. He has shown great integrity in holding the project team to account on issues they needed to address and has shown professionalism in putting challenging points across well and dedication in supporting the project team, despite an extremely heavy operations workload.
Jasmine just gets stuff done! She can be relied upon, she responds to requests and sorts out problems, treating everyone with respect no matter how trivial their issue. She is dedicated to doing excellent work and often goes above and beyond to resolve colleague’s issues.