Awarded by the Royal Statistical Society and The Health Foundation, this award recognises leading organisations conducting research that brings about improvements in healthcare.

The Perinatal Institute were awarded the 2024 Florence Nightingale award for the statistical methods applied in the development of the 'Projected Optimal Weight Range' (POWR) standard for growth velocity, the involvement of multiple teams and stakeholders in its creation, and it's impact on care.

The POWR method allows normal, slow or accelerated fetal growth from serial ultrasound measurement of fetal weight. The methodology was published open access and has since been tested and validated against pregnancy outcome on maternity datasets from the UK and New Zealand. The Perinatal Institute have made the application available as a stand-alone Growth Rate Calculator and incorporated it into the GROW 2.0 software of their national growth assessment programme.

Initial results from the first 8 hospitals that implemented GROW 2.0 with the POWR method showed a significant reduction in stillbirth rates from 4.1 to 2.7 /1000 (32% drop, p<0.01). The preliminary analysis was presented at the April 2024 British Maternal-Fetal Medicine conference.