West Dunbartonshire Health & Social Care Partnership (HSCP) staff have been honoured for their hard work.

The annual HSCP awards ceremony took place at Church Street in Dumbarton earlier this month.

Councillor Fiona Hennebry, vice chair of the HSCP Board, said: "It was great to attend. The awards honour and celebrate the hard work and achievements of inspirational local staff across health and social care services.

"I was really impressed with the quality of the nominations and delighted to hear about the winners in each of the five categories.

"I don’t really have a favourite as all the winners were excellent but I was particularly impressed with Gioia Sichi-Smith from the Alcohol and Drugs Recovery Service, because over the past year Gioia has been working hard expanding and transforming her skillset, leading to further enhanced harm reduction interventions being available to W/D ADRS users.

"Gioia has undertaken additional training on sexual and reproductive health, which she has completed successfully - and is now qualified to deliver smear testing to our female service users, sexual health screening, and signposting to sexual health services.

"It was also a great opportunity to have some of our employees who helped with the recent incident in Dalmuir, and be able to thank them for the excellent care they gave the residents who had been evacuated from their homes." 

We previously reported that a bomb was found inside a flat at Overtoun Court.

Residents were evacuated until a controlled explosion took place. Some were out of their homes for around 10 hours. 

Cllr Hennebry added: "The real winners are our community as they benefit all year round from having such dedicated and caring health and social care staff to support them in their time of need, and I want to convey my thanks to everyone within the HSCP for all their hard work."

The winners within each category were as follows:

  • West Dunbartonshire HSCP’s mental health officers won the Team of the Year award.
  • Nurse Gioia Sichi-Smith, from the Alcohol and Drugs Recovery Service, won the Employee of the Year award.
  • Business support supervisor, Joyce Habbo, won the Leader of the Year award.
  • The MSK project team received Innovation of the Year.
  • Physiotherapist Allison Graham won Volunteer of the Year.