Clinical Impact Awards

The National Clinical Impact Awards (CIAs) are part of the national pay award to medical and dental consultants and are intended to recognise and reward exceptional contribution over and above what is normally expected in a post.

Timings for 2025 applications

The 2025 National Clinical Impact Awards will open for applications on 01 April 2025 and the window is currently scheduled to close at 5pm on 27 May 2025. Please see the below provisional timetable:

• 01 April to 27 May 2025 – applications open
• January to February 2026 - notifications sent to successful applicants and finance processes initiated to pay awards
• January to February 2026 - appeals window open

All eligible RCPath members are encouraged to consider self-nomination for an award.

College Nominations and Citations

The College is no longer allowed by ACCIA to support their members with nominations or citations. There is therefore no College submission process.

Maximising your success

To maximize your score for national award applications, it’s important to:

• write for the lay members of the regional ACCIA panels – use no unexplained abbreviations, acronyms or jargon
• draft the submission in Word and use spellcheck as well as character count
• be clear and avoid repetition. To quote ACCIA in past years, “If it is not clear we assume obfuscation.”
• only include achievements from last four or five years
• use facts and figures as much as possible.

When structuring your application, use one paragraph per achievement. Each paragraph should include as a minimum:

• date/s and description of achievement including benchmark data if available
• for potential benchmarking of a pathologists work consider College guidelines and audit templates
• an unambiguous statement about your role in the achievement
• a clear explanation of why the achievement is important to patients i.e. the impact

The ACCIA is the authoritative source of information for the English scheme.

2025 process and policy changes

Following consultation with stakeholders through a series of focus groups in Autumn 2024, ACCIA have taken onboard feedback and made changes to processes and policy for the 2025 awards round. These changes will apply to applicants employed in both England and Wales.
Changes include:

• Changes to employer citations - Employers will no longer have to write citations for every applicant. Instead, employers will answer a short series of yes or no questions to verify the applicant is meeting their contractual obligations, have been truthful in their application and whether there are any investigations and sanctions in place. ACCIA will continue to provide the space for employers to detail any concerns they may have but this information will only be available to the central ACCIA team who will investigate any issues raised. Employers will also now be asked about their organisation’s CQC rating.
• Changes to the CQC/Healthcare Inspectorate Wales section – regulators ratings will no longer be requested from the applicant. Based on feedback received in the focus groups, this question will now sit under the employer verification stage. However, applicants are still free to detail how they have contributed towards their organisation’s CQC/HIW rating under the domains section.
• Changes to how payments are made - From 2025 onwards, all new awards will be granted from 1st April the year following application (i.e. awards in the 2025 round will start 1st April 2026). This differs from the prior process of backdating award payments for the first year.

New applicants successful in the 2024 round will still receive backdated payments as the new rule will only apply to the 2025 awards round and subsequent years.

ACCIA hopes this change will bring positive results by providing greater consistency. It aims to simplify the administration of awards at both the central and employer levels. Additionally, it will enable applicants to undertake better financial planning, as they will have a clearer understanding of the amount of money subject to tax in a given financial year - an advantage not available when awards where backdated.

Please contact ACCIA on [email protected] if you have any questions on how these changes may impact you.

2025 Resources from ACCIA

ACCIA has shared the following links which you may find useful for your application:

• Printable resources  – National Clinical Impact Awards: resources for applicants and employers - GOV.UK
• 2025 guidance for applicants - Clinical Impact Awards: guidance - GOV.UK