Submissions for 2025 are now open with a deadline of noon on Monday 7 April. Winners will be notified in May 2025 and the Award will be presented at our BDA Awards Ceremony in Birmingham on 4 June. If the winning entry has multiple authors the BDA will only be able to support attendance for one person.
Rose Simmonds was a leading pioneer in dietetics and a person of great character. The Rose Simmonds Award was at one time the only BDA Award. It has a distinguished beginning and a long history and is therefore the Association’s most prestigious Award.
The 2025 Award will be given for:
A Dietitian’s Original Research Publication in the Previous Two Years (2023-2024).
Those entering the Award should be aware of the following criteria:
- The dietitian must be one of the acknowledged authors and the published work must be addressed to professional colleagues. It is anticipated that this scientific work would encompass findings, results, outcomes and undertakings. Other examples include robust evaluation of clinical effectiveness. First time published authors are encouraged to apply.
- The applicant (s) does not need to be the sole or main author, although it must be clear that the applicant significantly contributed to the piece of work.
- The entry must be an original research paper “published” in print in a peer reviewed journal during the calendar years 2023-2024.
- Published means submitted to a peer review journal and available (either in hard copy or online) in the designated time frame.
- The dietitian can submit items previously submitted for other external awards.
- Members may submit more than one entry provided they meet the above criteria.
- Any published piece of work can only be submitted once.
The Award is open to all full BDA members and the winner will personally receive £3,000.
How to apply
- Please submit an anonymised copy of the published article or piece of work, removing the author’s name.
- Entries should be emailed to [email protected], with the title 'Rose Simmonds Award'
- Please clearly indicate which award you are entering, as well as your name, BDA membership number, address for correspondence, phone number, email address, current position, place of work and the name of your manager.
- Detail where and when the work was published, the entry cannot be considered without this.
- The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
It was an absolute honour to win the Rose Simmonds Award.
Winning this award and seeing the impact my publication has had so far has helped me realise how important it is for dietitians to collect outcomes in clinical practice and publish them.
We often think of research as something that belongs to academics or we think that we should only get involved in research of the highest quality, but it is so important that dietitians in clinical practice at every level are involved in research in different ways.
We must not forget that service evaluations and publishing outcomes from clinical practice are still essential, because we don’t have published data when it comes to dietetic outcomes in many areas of clinical practice. Service evaluations can often be critical first steps for us understand more about the cost-efficacy of having dietitians involved in the care of patients within real-life clinical practice.
The service evaluation I got published that helped me win this ward has helped fund more coeliac disease dietitians in in our hospital and will likely help dietitians with business cases in other hospitals, whilst also demonstrating the vital cost-effective role dietitians have in supporting patients living with coeliac disease.
Cristian Costas, Winner of the Rose Simmonds Award 2024