Somerset dietitian Leah Seamark carries off prestigious national award

It’s celebrations all round as one of our community dietitians 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 our 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 vi a series of webinars and a website.

Having moved to Somerset from Portsmouth in 2013 with her military husband, Leah is based in our neighbourhoods and community services, and is currently part time with her two little ones keeping her busy outside of work!

Leah 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, rewards 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.

Leah says: “I’m really 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.

“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 it met a lot of the awards criteria.

“This project has been ongoing since 2014, beginning with the development of a webinar aimed at patients with IBS.

“Our dietitians and gastroenterologists, as well as our GP colleagues, were seeing a lot of patients in clinic with IBS, and they’d in effect 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 the webinar first, and if it didn’t work, then they could come back to us for more specialist dietetic input where needed.

“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 our admin increased in sending patients specific links to all these different webinars, we felt that we needed a platform to store them that we could also quickly update ourselves as and when we needed to.

“That’s where the idea of a specific website came from, and back in 2018 one of our dietitians at the time, Lesley Harper, created a basic website from scratch…but 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.

“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 actually coincided with the beginning of the pandemic, so when all of a sudden we weren’t able to see our patients for their routine appointments face-to-face, we had this excellent resource literally ready to go – in fact we had around 30,000 patients across the country using it!

“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 we’ve added more and more webinars on the system, and each time we develop a new webinar we try to evaluate whether it’s helpful or not. To achieve this, we have pre and post-webinar questionnaires that we ask patients to fill in, which helps us to find out their change in knowledge, behaviours and confidence – all really important.”

Leah adds 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 was one of those things which we knew would be helpful, but this is the first time we’ve had that national recognition of the benefits of all those parts put together.

“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.

“There have been so many people involved in this, not just our dietetics department, but we’ve also linked in with our 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 so although we can put things in place to collect all the data, actually having the time to sit down and analyse it is really difficult. Making those links with MSc students and professors has been really helpful and has benefited the effectiveness of it so much.”

The 2025 Dr Falk Pharma/Guts UK Awards open in December. To find out more visit @drfalkuk Dr Falk Pharma UK on Linked In or visit https://drfalk.co.uk/hcp/dr-falkgutsuk-awards/