Paediatric consultant from RCHT wins Consultant Hero Award at this year’s PAFTAs

This year, Paediatric colleagues across Devon and Cornwall were celebrated at the annual Paediatric Awards For Training Achievements. The awards, dubbed the PAFTAS, were held on Saturday March 22 in St Mellion, Cornwall.

Among the winners this year was Dr. Natasha Sauven. Natasha is a Paediatric Consultant and Paediatric Eating Disorders and Community Paediatric Lead for Child Health at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust.

Discussing her work as part of the team, Natasha explains:

“I am a consultant and community paediatrician, but I mainly specialise in adolescent medicine. Since the pandemic, we’ve had an increasing number of young people presenting with eating disorders, and we’ve seen recent evidence that an increasing number of young people are presenting to acute paediatric wards with more mental health concerns too. We are also trying to look at areas where we can better assist the transition of young people with chronic conditions, such as cystic fibrosis, diabetes, or other conditions where they might need to be referred to adult teams and services.”

“I think it’s mostly about trying to see young people in a holistic manner,” Natasha continues. “Young people want to be seen as a person, not just their illness. Part of our approach has been in seeing young people for themselves, making sure that when we see them in clinics, we ask them in-depth, one-to-one questions. We’re not just looking at their conditions, but focusing on things like home, family, and education as well.”

Dr. Sauven was nominated for and eventually won the Consultant Hero Award. The nomination for this was put forward by Dr. Catriona Bowman. Catriona said of Dr. Sauven:

“Natasha is a brilliant consultant and an amazing person. She is unfailingly supportive to colleagues and trainees on both career and personal levels. Natasha is passionate about patient care, building new services from the ground up, such as the new ARFID service which launched earlier this year. This relates to the treatment of Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. She also works tirelessly in supporting new approaches, such as the community outreach and support team (COAST) to help facilitate eating disorder management at home. As a ‘Consultant Hero’, she advocates continuously for the adolescent group of patients.”

Natasha was able to attend the award ceremony in person, where other teams from RCHT were shortlisted for awards on the night.

Natasha adds: “There was a dinner held in St Mellion as part of the awards. We all had tables and there was a table for those of us from Cornwall. I feel fairly self-conscious having won it but it is lovely to have been nominated. It was great to have the opportunity to wave the banner for adolescent medicine and to promote the message that young people deserve to be listened to and heard as much as anyone else.”