Improving Together: Significant Sustained Improvements - CEO Caroline Donovan's Blog - 15 January
Hello everyone and welcome to my latest blog.
I am delighted that we are starting 2024 as we left last year – continuing with our commitment to significant, sustained improvement. With this in mind, I’m sure you’ll join me in welcoming two new members to our leadership team: Claire Holmes who is here on an interim basis to develop our clinical pathway redesign programme, Claire is a very experienced senior clinical leader and manager with a professional mental health social work background. She is passionate about mental health services and has a strong improvement focus, working in collaboration with others. Claire will support us as we complete the recruitment process for a substantive Chief Transformation Officer. Rebecca Driver joined us this week as our new Director of Communications and Engagement. Rebecca brings extensive senior experience in her field as well as knowledge and understanding of the local health system. Both roles are crucial to our ongoing progress.
Listening into Action (LiA) continues at pace and we have had great interest in the LiA lead roles which were advertised to our staff recently. Over the last few weeks I have spoken with many interested staff and received several formal applications for the post. The whole purpose of the LiA programme is to take action to enable clinically-led change for the better. With the clinical leaders in place, and as we further embed the programme, we will be engaging widely with staff and show visible actions in response to their suggestions. By putting staff at the very centre of positive change, we are making a fundamental shift in how we work and lead. We’ve launched the LiA Pulse Check today – a two minute anonymous survey to find out how our staff feel about working at NSFT and to seek ideas for practical change. Please do fill it in! I am very much looking forward to updating you on progress.
Successfully engaging with our staff is essential if we are to achieve our improvement objectives. We have had some very helpful and interesting feedback on our Hear to Listen staff engagement events. Based on what our staff have told us, we will now move to a fortnightly timetable, with hour-long sessions, themed to reflect our priorities. I look forward to seeing more staff at the next Hear to Listen event.
I enjoyed my recent visit to Northgate Hospital in Great Yarmouth and the opportunity it gave me to meet staff and service users there, in both community and in-patient teams. As always, I was impressed with what I saw and with the recent improvement work there. While I was there, I also attended one of the workshops to discuss our organisational restructure. It was great to meet people and to hear their thoughts and views about how services should be organised. Thank you to John Bingham, Nicky Shaw, Helen Lawrence, Kofi Banga, Percy Mupemhi and Nina Savory for hosting me.
I am pleased to report that we will also be building on our programme of ‘Board to team’ visits across services and will now include Governors also. The purpose is to facilitate greater understanding of each other’s roles, giving staff opportunities to demonstrate their services and successes, and also, to seek high-level intervention where they think this will be helpful. They are not inspections!
Last week, I attended an executive away day, and a Board development session where we confirmed our four strategic priorities and the large-scale change programmes to support them. These had been developed further following more engagement with all stakeholders. Our four priorities remain – improving health, improving care, improving culture and improving value.
You can see more here.
As we begin 2024, I look forward to a new year with real opportunity and hope ahead. Together, we will establish a safer, kinder and better organisation for the benefit of our service users and carers, our colleagues and our communities. I am excited about our future and really look forward to working alongside our staff and stakeholders as we continue our improvement journey.
Until next time,
Caroline