The service, which covers both Otago and Southland, was leading the way for the regionalisation of services, board chief operating officer, Vivian Blake, said, when presenting the awards.
The service has made dramatic improvements in waiting times for patients.
Eighteen months ago, patients were waiting up to 40 days to get their first appointment with a specialist, but now the average wait in Otago was eight days, and Southland patients had no wait.
The Ministry of Health required patients wait no longer than 28 days. The service was awarded the chief executive officer's improvement award and given a data projector.
It was one of eight finalists for the award among a record 35 entries.
Board quality and risk manager Catherine Rae said both the number and quality of the entries had grown in the three years the awards had been held, and it was pleasing to see the number of projects where changes were being subjected to ongoing evaluation.
Other finalists: a project to improve and standardise the treatment of people with tracheostomies; the development of a nurse practitioner's role in elderly mental health care; clinics for radiotherapy patients where radiotherapists and nurses share the care; standardising the setup of emergency bedside equipment; the two-year project to improve hospital food; improving management of CT scanning which has resulted in waiting lists for non-urgent cases falling from 57 weeks to about 12 weeks; and an ongoing study of the prevalence and incidence of pressure ulcers to gauge the effectiveness of treatments for them.
The other 27 projects, which all received merit awards from the clinical board, included: improving fracture clinic appointment allocations to reduce patients' waiting times; finding a new design for intensive care unit nursing trolleys; and developing a resource kit for staff dealing with patient death.
