The applause fades, the trophies go home, and the room empties. For most people watching from outside, that’s where the story of an award ends. Norfolk Care Association caught up with five winners from the 2025 Norfolk Care Awards several months on to find out what actually happens next, and in every case, the ceremony turned out to be a beginning, not a conclusion.
Recognition belongs to the whole team
Ask last year’s winners who the award was really for, and the answer comes back the same way: not them alone.
Angela Herbert received the Harold Bodmer Lifetime Achievement Award for her work at St Martins Housing, but she’s quick to redirect the credit. “It wasn’t just a celebration of what I have done, It was a celebration of all our teams and the quality of the service they provide,” she says. For the staff around her, the award became something to point to: proof that what they’d been doing quietly, day after day, had been seen.
At Cavell Court, that same instinct shows up somewhere you can actually see it. The trophy from Pedro Campos’s Outstanding Leadership award doesn’t sit in his office; it’s in reception, where residents, families and staff pass every day. “That was not an individual award,” he says. “I can’t be a good leader if I don’t have a good team working with me.” Staff who walk past it each morning are reminded of something specific: that the work they did last year mattered enough to be recognised.
Frances, Operations Manager at Cygnet Care, didn’t even know she’d been put forward. Her director nominated her for the same award, without telling her, and she came back from holiday to find colleagues, managers and her own family gathered to share the news, she’d been Highly Commended. What stayed with her afterwards wasn’t the recognition itself, but who had noticed: someone watching the years the effort, saying you make a difference.
Recognition creates momentum
For Home Instead Norwich, recognition didn’t close a chapter, it opened one. Their Innovation in Social Care award recognised “Betty,” a training mannequin used to give new care professionals real, hands-on practice during induction, instead of learning everything from a manual. New starters no longer just studied care, they practiced it before they ever meet a client.
The difference shows up in how people describe starting the job. “It’s nice to see that we’re not just imagining it,” says Ruth Rimmington, who leads the initiative. “We’re actually seeing the change as a result of it.” Staff satisfaction with induction and training rose from 90% to 100%; new starters saying they felt supported by their managers rose from 87% to 100%. Behind those numbers are new care professionals walking into their first client visit feeling confident and better equipped to care. The same thinking; that small, tested changes compound, is now shaping the organisation’s early work exploring how technology could help spot falls risk or dehydration before they become emergencies.
At Cavell Court, that same momentum has turned outward. A local primary school now visits for a dementia-awareness project built around Archie, a character who helps children understand what dementia means for the people they meet. A research partnership with the University of East Anglia has drawn on the direct experience of residents and relatives, not just staff, to shape new training. Cavell Court itself has started supporting other Care UK homes across Norfolk directly, passing on what it learned rather than keeping it in-house. “Sometimes the little things are the major things,” Pedro says – as true of a shared training programme as it is of being able to deliver a resident’s long-awaited fishing trip.
Recognition inspires people
Cameron Carter was 24 when he received the Inspiring Individual award while being a Registered Manager and QA Lead at ArmsCare. By then he was already overseeing multiple services and holding Quality and Safeguarding Lead responsibilities, having started working in care at 15.
He doesn’t talk about that path as a career ladder. He talks about it in terms of who it lets him help. Cameron Says, “As I kept going up, I realised how much more chance I had to actually make a proper change.” What drives him isn’t the next title, it’s the specific, repeated experience of watching someone arrive anxious and withdrawn, and leave months later more confident. “It’s good to see people getting their independence back,” he says.
What this means for the sector
None of this started with the awards ceremony. It started with people doing work worth noticing, long before anyone wrote it down. But recognition changed what happened next, a team kept asking each other what next; a care home began teaching what it had learned to others it had never worked with before; a new manager kept taking on more, because each step gave him the opportunity to help make more people’s days better.
That’s what recognition does well: it turns quiet, good work into something visible enough to build on. Multiplied across a sector already stretched thin, that visibility matters, it’s how one team’s innovation becomes everyone’s practice, and how confidence, once given, keeps paying forward.
Nominations for the Norfolk Care Awards 2026 are now open. If there’s an individual, team or organisation making a genuine difference within your service, we’d encourage you to put them forward.
What this means for the sector
None of this started with the awards ceremony. It started with people doing work worth noticing, long before anyone wrote it down. But recognition changed what happened next, a team kept asking each other what next; a care home began teaching what it had learned to others it had never worked with before; a new manager kept taking on more, because each step gave him the opportunity to help make more people’s days better.
That’s what recognition does well: it turns quiet, good work into something visible enough to build on. Multiplied across a sector already stretched thin, that visibility matters, it’s how one team’s innovation becomes everyone’s practice, and how confidence, once given, keeps paying forward.
Nominations for the Norfolk Care Awards 2026 are now open. If there’s an individual, team or organisation making a genuine difference within your service, we’d encourage you to put them forward.
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