A SOMERSET community dietitian has gained a top prize in the prestigious 2024 Dr Falk Pharma/Guts UK Charity national awards held in Birmingham.

Leah Seamark, who has led Somerset NHS Foundation Trust’s community dietetic gastro service for almost five years, won the Dietitian Recognition Prize, on behalf of her team, for their work in giving dietary advice to patients with a wide range of gut conditions including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and coeliac disease – all via series of webinars and a website.

Leah said she was thrilled to have won the award, which is jointly run by Guts UK, the charity for digestive conditions in the UK, and Dr Falk Pharma UK, a pharmaceutical company that develops medications for digestive and metabolic diseases.

The awards, which are now in their 19th year, reward medical students, trainee doctors, dietitians, nurses and pharmacists working within GI and hepatology.

The dietitian award recognises innovative work that improves the care of patients with digestive conditions.

“I’m proud to have won this award as in Somerset our track record with providing innovative dietetic interventions for IBS is great, as we established the first UK dietetic-led primary care gastroenterology clinic back in 2011, which was led by former dietetic colleague Marianne Williams,” Leah said. “I knew a few dietitians who had won this award in the past, but I had completely forgotten about this until a colleague from Roehampton University, who we were collaborating with on a service evaluation, reminded me of it – they felt I met a lot of the awards criteria.”

The project Leah and her team have been working on has been ongoing since 2014, beginning with the development of a webinar aimed at patients with IBS.

The Somerset dietitians and gastroenterologists, as well as the NHS GP colleagues, were seeing a lot of patients in clinic with IBS, and they’d often be given the same dietary advice in various clinic appointments

“We therefore changed the way we gave this advice and began to ask patients to watch a webinar first, and if it didn’t work, then they could come back to us for more specialist dietetic input where needed,” Leah added. “That’s very much where it all began – a single live webinar running one evening a month. We had some really good feedback about this, as our patients felt it was a really useful tool, and we were then able to develop similar on-demand webinars for coeliac disease, constipation, and a wide range of other gut conditions.”

As the webinars grew more popular, so did the demand for Leah and her team to send out all the different links.

As their admin increased in sending patients links to different webinars to follow for advice on IBS and gastro diseases, they realised they needed a platform so that people could easily access all the necessary information.

This is where the idea for a website came from, back in 2018 one of the Somerset dietitians at the time, Lesley Harper, created a basic website from scratch.

“We found that the traffic going through it started to increase to huge levels, not just patients in Somerset, but those outside the county too,” Leah said.  “We got some funding to update the website and ensure it was in line with NHS accessibility, with a company called The Ideas Bureau helping us with the redesign.

The website launch coincided with the beginning of the global pandemic, which really helped all those who could no longer have face-to-face appointments.

“We had this excellent resource literally ready to go – in fact we had around 30,000 patients across the country using it,” Leah added excitedly. “It meant that we were still able to direct our patients to some dietetic evidence-based information, even if we hadn’t seen them to start off with – it was a great alternative during that period of time.”

Over the years the team have added more and more webinars on the system catered to their customers requests from patient questionnaires.

Leah added that she feels the team didn’t win the award for just one element of the project, but instead for the combination of the patient webinar and platform to host them, as well as the evaluations that support the effectiveness of them.

“It was absolutely fantastic to hear that we’d won the award and it’s very much for the whole community gastro dietetic team, which have all contributed to the various projects,” she says. “We’re always pushing the boundaries and looking at new ways of providing care and the patient webinars. Our department even got £1,000 as part of the awards, which was very welcome, and this will go into a pot for continuing professional development and further webinar developments. We were also invited to an awards ceremony that was hosted as part of the British Society of Gastroenterology annual conference.”

Leah adds that there were so many people involved in this, not just the dietetics department, but the gastroenterologists at Musgrove Park and Yeovil hospitals, as well as a group of MSc students in Leeds and Roehampton who, as part of their dissertations, have analysed the data for us so that we can publish the reports.

“Those links make such a big difference because, as clinicians, our time is limited. Making those links with MSc students and professors has been really helpful and has benefited the effectiveness of it so much,” Leah finished by saying.

The 2025 Dr Falk Pharma/Guts UK Awards open in December.